NEXT BIG THING IN MOBILE MARKETING: GEO FENCING AND EMOTION SENSING ON MOBILE

Let’s find out, how a few fast emerging technologies can help startups to cross the bridge to your prospects mind. This writeup is a preview to a certain tech trends which would make business promotion and marketing hit the bulls eye more often.  We have a compiled typical list of challenges faced by startups like yours and we know these questions often cross the minds of decision makers like you:

• How can businesses get customers in off-peak hours?
• How to gauge emotional engagement of customers with your offers, coupons and promotions?
• How to tactically align your marketing efforts to serve the customer who add high value for your business?
• How to localize and pinpoint your offers, promotions and sales efforts?
• How to evaluate, predict and analyze your customer behavior?

You wanna engage your prospects faster than your competitor; so that you can find answers to the above questions. Such probing is beneficial to optimize marketing efforts, predict expected results; thus, improving chances of getting favorable customer responses by use of technology.

Geo fencing is one such technology that can help decision makers like you, to overcome most of the challenges listed above. Geo fencing creates a virtual fence in a particular geographic area around your business. This fence helps you to engage with your customers who opted in.This is done using GPS and location information in their mobile device.

Doing this isn’t something innovative now, but doing it well can get you repeated customers. This process of getting customers could be broken down into the following:

1. Finding a customer: Reaching out to a customer was a big deal earlier, now with mobile everywhere you could reach customers with awesome offers at any time of the day.
2. Reaching out to the customer: Sending texts when they are ready for your messages is the biggest problem. For instance, you want to reach out to Mark through a push notification; when he is inside a cafe, near a particular aisle in a retail store or inside a metro station to trigger a favorable action that your business can capitalize on. To do so your business needs to find:

• Where Mark is?
• What he is up to that moment?
• What was his routine when he reached a location near to your business?
• What are specific location details?

(Such as local weather, local holiday updates, local events etc.)

• What are his personal triggers? (Is it a special day or not.)
• How is he feeling on a particular day or at the moment when you reach out to him?

1. Sophisticated targeting: After knowing the above variables about Mark, a smart application would have relevant information on Mark’s consumption triggers like his environment, daily routine and behavior inside your app. When your business knows the above variables then you can engage and target Mark. Such a non-intrusive engagement could be done through location based SMS’s, instant messaging or even a push notification via user’s mobile device. This makes business promotion hyper local and exactly targeted to the best fit customer persona and expected response.
2. Re-engagement after sales: When you have vast data points about customer activity on a various time specific behaviors such as below.

• What time of day Mark is more active?
• Does he pass through your business location multiple times?
• What would Mark generally prefer on a hot day compared to other days?
• When will he be willing to use complimentary offers or coupons?

Marketers could  reengage with Mark by analyzing his routine, daily behavioral patterns and location based information.

1. Generate word of mouth: Mark comes often to your business, he even writes reviews for your business in Yelp. You can infer that your positive engagement is giving him a reason for recommending your business again. Your positive interaction with Mark is achieved mainly due to the use of smart technology and the resultant improvements in service quality.

Geo location based technology to target customers has been there for a long time. Now a days this technology is sharper when combined with Bluetooth or NFC.

I heard people say, future of marketing depends on delivering the right message when people are in a mood to listen.  Delivering the right message according to customer emotion depends on wise use of user intelligence.

The below information makes your marketing effort robust thus making it reach more customers in a more intuitive and intelligent manner:

• When not to reach out to a person?
• When exactly to reach out to a person to trigger a positive action?

Next big thing In Mobile Marketing: Apps with Geo fencing and emotion sensing tech.

Customer’s facial expression are a window to their mind. So, let’s explore a technology that can let you know what your customer is feeling after seeing your product online or watching your advertisement or reading a review or after consuming your product.

Building blocks for such a smart app is available now, a company called Affectiva is pioneering this technology. We believe there is a good scope for this technology in everyday marketing.

This technology will work real time in any place, with any face or with any software platform. If you could know which SMS or mobile push notification worked real time by using customer’s facial expressions. This gives your campaign management, multi-dimensional effectiveness. Thus, ushering in the era of real time customer behavior based targeting are apps with Geo fencing with emotional sensing tech on mobile platforms.

Imagine, great offers generated and updated based on real time customer response. This technology will work because now every tablet and smart phone has a camera in front and these devices have location sensing tech inside.

Emotional sensing technology will bring great wave of innovation because many apps will integrate API’s of emotion sensing software into their ecosystem. This tech makes mobile marketing an intuitive and simple thus bringing happy days for mobile marketers.