The Local Search Association (LSA), a not-for-profit industry association of media companies, agencies, and tech providers who help businesses market to local consumers, recently released predictions for location-based marketing, advertising & commerce. It offers perspectives from 24 industry experts, including Skai’s Director of Business Development, Nate Young.
Continue reading below for an excerpt of Nate’s comments or check out the full set of predictions from LSA.
Personalization: More and more consumers will expect both national-local and local-local businesses to understand their purchase preferences and what step of the buying process they’re in, with an expectation of convenience. Yet, they’ll demand brands accomplish all of this without being intrusive.
To present timely messages within the context of a consumer’s preferred medium (mobile phone, tablet, desktop, etc.), brands will need to understand how and when to present the appropriate message based on proximity and market (various markets behave differently); bring a consumer-centric approach to marketing, customer service and the buying experience; and focus on both new and existing customers alike, as loyalty is easily lost but not easily gained as competition for customers continues to rise.
Specifically, retailers will focus on personalization – utilizing location, device, first- and third-party data to understand intent and context of individual customers. Then, they will leverage the information to produce highly relevant ads, copy and offers to drive consumer behavior. They’ll do this through the use of apps, (order ahead, loyalty points, payment), smart call routing and knowledgeable reps, online behavior coupled with individual customer data, same-day delivery and beacon technology to create a hyper-personalized shopping experience.
Proliferation of Publishers and Channels: 2015 saw Instagram, Yahoo Gemini, and other major industry players enter the ad publishing game, and 2016 should continue that trend. To handle the growing number of publishers and ad types, SMBs will likely become more reliant on agencies to manage their budgets, whereas agencies will become more reliant on technology to do so effectively and efficiently.
SMB & On-Demand: Collaborative consumption (shared economy) will continue to expand in 2016. The “Uber-fication” of services and products, including hotels (Airbnb), transportation (Uber, Lyft), services (Taskrabbit), financial services (LendingClub), logistics (Instacart), will drive a shift towards the individual entrepreneur and away from the larger national brands. In turn, this will put an emphasis on catering to the consumer by providing more value through understanding local market needs and adding value through convenience.