Mobile: Sure They Listen But Do You Know Where They Live?

One of the greatest challenges is working to identify who your mobile fans are.  Given that latitude and longitude are the most common data points; how do we as marketers build a profile of these active fans.  Most mobile apps will ask you to log in with a social network enabling them to capture some first person data that can help you start to build a profile and that's a great start.  When we build our apps we think about the audience first.  Not only what functionality will keep them engaged but what we do with the data we collect to build out new features.

There a number of easy ways to capture mobile user data.  Single sign on (SS0) is one such tactic but there's so much more that can be done.  If you don't have the ability to buy big data and overlay your audience you can start by doing some basic things:

1.  Mobile Only Contest Registration:  This may be one of the simplest things you can do by building hidden web pages or in app contest entry pages that allows you to collect first person data that can be merged with other user profiles.

2.  Gated and Windowed Content:  By creating content that is only open to premium users you can drive registration data.  An ongoing release of gated and windowed content allows you to create small chunks of bite size data on a regular basis which has high appeal (do your homework first to find hot topics!)

It's important to understand that mobile listening is different than desktop or listening and collecting mobile listener locations during live streaming will more than likely produce migration patterns during the day due to portability.  This is actually one of the greatest assets of mobile user data as it can give us insights to how people move around a city during the day.

Heat Maps and Retail Beacons

Heat Maps have been used in marketing research for decades and now that mobile users are not only receiving information they are also sending a wealth of information back to service providers.  At AirKast we allow our clients to quickly see where their mobile listeners are streaming from in a market down to County level.  Yet another data point that can be leverage for radio sales or programming or any advertising buyer who wants to know 'where do your users live'.

Below is a snapshot of a major national Conservative talk show host.  Not only do we see heavily concentrated listening areas but fringe areas where they are popular.  When working with national advertisers this is a great visual to explain where to aim your marketing.  The next immediate layer of data that will help guide your advertising efforts could be retail foot traffic attribution within these key states and counties.  You've now started to create a behavioral profile of your mobile audience.

Here are some quick stats on beacons:

65% of retails who employ the beacon technology claim they are able to target customers “down to the aisle level”;

24% of beacon adopters have registered a steady growth in sales;

59% of customers who receive beacon notifications feel more engaged in stores.

If relevancy drives engagement this combination of data can be a very potent mix for your mobile marketing plan.