EMBiz: Why Proximity Marketing is the Next Big Thing
Why Proximity Marketing is the Next Big Thing
Cody Owens
Hi Cody here, Content Director at Elevate My Brand, and in this EMBiz video I'm gonna talk to you about proximity marketing. Proximity marketing is considered by a lot of marketers the next big thing. While it's been in existence and in use for quite some time, it is making a bit of a resurgence in a lot of marketing strategies. So, in this video, I want to talk to you about what is proximity marketing, what are some of the major use cases, and why it's important for brands.
What is proximity marketing?
First of all, what is proximity marketing? Well, just like it sounds, it is a marketing strategy that uses people's proximity to certain places in order to give them ads and content based on their locational data. It leverages people's geolocation-enabled devices. So if people have a device that is WIFI-, RFID-, Bluetooth- or GPS-enabled, then whenever people enter a specific geo-fenced area, they suddenly are eligible to be served these content pieces or ads.
So, what's really great about this as opposed to really old, more like proximity marketing tactics like a 50-mile radius on Google ads is that you can draw organic shapes. You can be very targeted and niche with the sort of boundaries and geofence around the area. It can be as small as a city block.
What else can proximity marketing be used for?
There's a lot more you can do with proximity marketing in terms of how you target people on their location. The three major use cases are:
If you are a cultural event.
So maybe your brand is not a cultural event, but you want to leverage a cultural event. If you are an athletics company, you could draw a fence around the pro like a perimeter of the Boston Marathon and you can serve ads about running shoes or water bottles or what have you just to the people who are going to be within a specific place at a specific time for that cultural event.
You can also think about if you are an event organizer, let's say you're throwing a conference in a specific city, then you can put a fence around that area or around the hotels in that area to be able to target content around your event to the people who are going to be nearby. So it's a really great way for event planners and marketers to be able to target people who are going to be near that event during a specific time.
For brick-and-mortar locations.
Let's say you're a candy shop and you have three locations within a specific county. In the past, you've been able to do a 2550-mile radius around each store. But now you can get so much more specific with the geofence. So let's say, you run the same ad and run separate messaging around the local stadium as you do around the local art museum. You can tailor and personalize that message to the people whose interests are going to align with those locations. You can set dates and times around it, seasonality can get involved.
Proximity marketing is great, especially now that in the post-COVID age, people are far more interested in in-person experiences. This proximity marketing strategy is becoming bigger and bigger.
For hospitality.
So if you have a specific location but not a specific time, it's really great for tourist destinations and hotels. And this is also a good use case because it doesn't even have to be your specific location. A lot of hotels will use proximity marketing to target people who are at specific tourist, donate destinations nearby, or at their competitor's locations. So it's specific locations, not necessarily your own, but not a specific time. Of course, you can use it to target seasonality for specific times as well. But it is a huge use case and it is used a lot in hospitality marketing.
So the three major use cases and our experience is hospitality, brick-and-mortar and cultural events.
Why is proximity marketing so important?
Well, the big one is return on investment in the days of your, you are only able to geo-target a specific area with ads and content if you use costly methods, like billboards and putting up posters and like transit ads. But now proximity marketing has made geo-fencing content for your customers accessible to essentially everyone and it's way more cost-effective and has high ROI.
And then the second biggest importance is personalization. Again, going back to the use cases, you can tailor your message to people who are at a specific area or a specific block or a specific neighborhood or even a specific business, but you can’t tailor your marketing to people who are within that specific geo-fence.
So that's why proximity marketing is huge and why it is going to continue to get bigger and why a lot of marketers are saying this is sort of the next big thing. If you're interested in trying proximity marketing, please reach out to us at Elevate My Brand. We'd love to help you identify and execute a proximity marketing campaign for you.