Marketers always need to have unique and effective ways to target their customers -- especially during the holiday season, which is for many brands their make or break point of their respective fiscal years.
Given the fact that consumers have a multitude of touch points today, finding them is a key to engaging them.
Two months ago Capital One and PushPoint introduced new tools to help small business owners target customers, promote products, and drive sales using the latest location-based marketing technology.
Spark Pay, Capital One’s mobile point-of-sale solution for small businesses, enables business owners to create and distribute special deals through a variety of channels including Facebook, Twitter, and email. Consequently, businesses are able to better target shoppers during the holidays.
By leveraging PushPoint’s innovative location-based technology, Spark Pay users target digital “offers” to nearby consumers.
How does it work? PushPoint’s offer management platform, OfferHubTM, enables marketers to better target shoppers by enabling them to create, distribute, and manage engaging ads and offers in minutes within one, simple dashboard. These promotions can then be pushed to consumers through a variety of near-store and in-store marketing channels including SMS messages, mobile banners, social media, and Bluetooth Beacons.
What’s more, OfferHub’s “geo-fence” functionality allows marketers to only target consumers within a specific, designated geographic region. And unlike other promotion management platforms, OfferHub provides marketers with complete visibility into exactly how many inbound customers and total purchase revenue each campaign is generating – allowing for attribution of digital advertisement spend properly.
PushPoint CEO Greg McAllister told Loyalty 360 that PushPoint brings all the commonly-used types of mobile marketing - email, SMS, search, social, and mobile banner ads - into one system, OfferHub.
“No one is providing that simplicity and cross-channel marketing management for SMBs today,” McAllister said.
Amid various opinions on the market pace mobility has taken, McAllister is convinced that mobile is “definitely” taking off as quickly as expected.
“Mobile banner ad spend will hit $10B in 2013, but this is largely by national retailers with big ad budgets and sophisticated tools and practices to make mobile work in this early phase,” McAllister said. “SMBs, which are our focus, are more cautious about new marketing mediums because they often lack the budget, time, and know-how to experiment. That said, the digital marketing channels they do use - search, email, social - are all being responded to now on mobile devices, so everything is moving to mobile anyway. PushPoint provides all these options as needed, as well as cutting-edge technology like Bluetooth beacon support for in-store engagement. Diversity is our best tool for SMBs.”
With so many marketers focused on mobile engagement, McAllister offered his thoughts on the topics.
“Location, naturally, is the biggest addition to the process, and will redefine relevancy in mobile marketing and engagement,” he said. “The content that an ad is paired with (sports ads on sports content) may matter less than the location that the ad is paired with (sports ads near a sports venue).”
The other major addition is online-to-offline tracking, McAllister added.
“As the ad is seen on the phone and then the phone is present at the location and likely used to pay for the purchase - all will be ‘online,’ which makes attributing the success metric back to the digital engagement very straightforward, making ROI measurement easy.’’