December 1, 2014
E-commerce marketers are eagerly tapping into the marketing opportunities presented by the increase in Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) technology in electronic handheld devices; especially smart phones. One such e-commerce marketer, Blasting Companies, avidly promotes GPS enabled targeting marketing as a viable tool for companies. On its website the company gives a few different approaches to how it can help companies “cash in” on the growing installation of GPS chips in phones. Blasting Companies endorses an approach of minimizing the amount of effort customers and prospective customers have to use to find store locations and identify good promotional deals. The company uses a GPS messaging app to send specialized messages to customers once they get within certain proximity of a client’s establishment. The message would be tailored towards the user’s preferences and send them coupons based on current promotions, inventory, and sales volumes. One example they have listed would be a location based, time specific style on demand coupon alert messaged to a customer with a coupon that may only be good for the next 15 minutes. Other examples listed are movie alerts with show times at nearby theatres and wait times for nearby restaurants or theme parks. NorthPage focuses more on the competitive advantages it can offer to a company through the use of its digital marketing GPS. This marketer offers that its digital marketing GPS can help marketing executives set and calibrate strategy, benchmark performance and gain critical market and competitive insight. NorthPage assures companies that their GPS marketing can also help them, “grow revenue and market share, improve user experience and quality, and grow awareness and knowledge of the customers’ true desires. NorthPage’s Digital Marketing GPS automatically identifies and consolidates mobile content based on what the targeted customer is viewing on their phone. NorthPage’s product then benchmarks the company’s marketing and promotional programs against over 4,000 current, proven strategies, techniques and best practices sourced from thought leaders, experts and leading marketers. The program then scores their client’s programs across categories like, awareness creation, demand generation, opportunity conversion, customer engagement, and digital branding. After scoring their client, the product then does the same process with whatever information can be gathered on its competitors to provide market competitive insight and guidance. The system then continuously monitors the marketing programs of both the client company and its competitors and