Firstly, what do we mean by hyperlocal? We're talking about allowng marketers to use smartphones' GPS systems to geographically target audiences for the purposes of delivering relevant ads. You can therefore target consumers not only by the desired strategy of the campaign, so the right demographic profile for example, or they've been recently done something online that suggests they're a good customer for you, but also they're located geographically in a location that's really prime.
Why is this something that's really important? In the UK, customers only spend 2 hours a day accessing the internet on their phone, so with hyperlocal targeting you can start connecting with them in unique and powerful ways, and you can drive audiences to your brick and mortar stores, building targeted audiences within a specified geography or pull them away from your competitors' physical stores. Hyperlocal targeting really can be a effective strategy to engage the right consumers at the right time at the right place.
Talking about cross-device, let me just clarify what I mean by this. It's important to address the fact that consumers are interacting with brands across a complex web of interactions, spanning different channels and different devices. It's important to address a common misconception which is to assume that mobile campaigns automatically involve or include cross-device tracking and targeting. Whilst a mobile campaign will certainly help you to get exposure to consumers who are browsing the mobile web, what it won't do is help you understand the subsequent sales network made by the consumers across all devices that were influenced by the mobile campaign. If you can't track consumers across devices, you're gonna miss the opportunity to retarget someone who has abandoned your mobile site the next time we see them browsing online on a desktop device. In addition to that, without cross-device tracking, you're never going to be able to understand the actual return delivered by a mobile campaign which will mean that you will struggle to justify a further investment in future mobile campaigns. And in line with mobile uses trends, retailers everywhere are seeing their mobile traffic soar. It's becoming painfully evident that consumers are now conducting the majority of their research on mobile devices and it's so important that we're engaging consumers where they spend the majority of their time so that we can actual reach them during the consideration phase and influence their decision on where and what to buy when they're ready to make that purchase. Cross-device have become a critical part of today's marketing strategy as marketing leaders realise that they can't afford to not be on mobile. Historically, there's been a number of challenges in identifying consumers across devices and delivering mobile-optimised experiences, but with the new technologies in the market, it means that marketers are feeling empowered and can embrace these solutions with confidence.
I guess the approach we look to try and take with the brands we work with - we use a series of matching methodologies to identify a user's device, so we can collate ID methods such as a desktop cookie, log in data, header info and Android IDs, and marry this with inter-device data which can include a user's IP address or their referral sources. And we basically look at and analyse all these different data points that we're collecting to identify the various devices that are owned by individual consumers, and start to connect the touchpoints across all the journeys.
