NEW YORK – Executives from Ubimo and Advantage Marketing Partners at the MMA Mobile Marketing Leadership Forum highlighted the implications and insights stemming from location-based shopper marketing that are driving brands’ revenue-generating efforts.

During the session, “How Mobile and Local Data are Transforming Shopper Marketing,” the executives stressed the need for specific bricks-and-mortar stores to leverage shopper marketing by A/B testing advertisements on consumers’ smartphones and tapping into affinity data. If marketers want to cinch sales from a customer, they must understand where that individual may be at any given moment.

“When you look at shopper marketing, it was one of the last marketing budgets to be impacted by digital,” said Chris Boucher, senior vice president of advertising technology at Advantage Marketing Partners. “Mobile’s completely changed that.”

Marrying physical context with digital
Although shopper marketing was typically considered an in-store strategy, the constant connectivity – and presence – of mobile has pushed it over to the digital realm. One major benefit to shopper marketing is that brands can more effectively segment their individual stores’ audiences by leveraging it.

“Every single store has its own affinity data,” said Gilad Amitai, chief operating officer and co-founder of Ubimo.

For example, by tapping into mobile location data, marketers can tell if there are specific levels of income around a store. They can also discover other valuable information about the nearby population if they find out that the store is next to an army base or a university.

Pinpointing consumers’ whereabouts at other times of the day can help marketers tailor their ads in a way that will fuel more purchases at the point of sale.

“If you want to know who I am, you have to understand where I am,” Advantage Marketing Partners’ Mr. Boucher said. “I’m on the soccer field Saturday morning.

“I’m on the lake on the weekend. When you talk about affinity marketing, that’s what I look at.”

Promoting data discovery
Mr. Boucher also suggested that 25 to 30 cents of every marketing dollar should be allocated toward data discovery – even if it means figuring out which customers are not part of a brand’s target audience.

Leveraging mobile can certainly get this accomplished, since all data sets are available under its platform.

Additionally, with mobile-enabled shopper marketing, brands have greater opportunities to foster customer engagement.

Consumers stuck in long lines at stores frequently pull out their smartphones in a bid to distract themselves with engaging content, thereby opening doors for marketers to reach them during these critical moments and serve product suggestions or coupons.

“What I really like about mobile is [thinking about] how many times a day you’re going to your mobile device and you don’t know what you’re going to do when you take the mobile device out of your pocket,” Ubimo’s Mr. Amitai said.

“Desktop is a very intent-driven device, versus your mobile phone, which most of the time, is all [about] killing time.”