The Race for Hyperlocal Deals Is On

With more daily deal sites flooding the market every day, marketers are grappling with how to get them in people’s hands at the point of purchase. At the Daily Deals Summit on Wednesday, Josh Engroff of EveryScreen Media deemed this “The Race for Hyperlocal.”

Engroff began his talk by digging into the daily deal industry’s shiny new buzzword: SoLoMo (Social/Local/Mobile), which Engroff sees as the key to presenting a consumer with a deal they will buy. In short, marketers must offer users a deal through the apps they’re using, in the right location, on their mobile device.

Certainly, there’s growing potential in mobile sales; Paypal processed more than $4 billion in mobile sales last year, and Square processes more than 11 million mobile transactions each day. Engroff also cites reports that local advertising will account for over 70% of all mobile advertising in 2016. The future is rosy, but the present is tricky.

Location, Location, Location

The first hurdle is serving people location-relevant mobile ads — in New York City, a deal 0.6 miles away is too far, according to Engroff. Only 10% of mobile ad impressions contain latitude/longitude data, which makes it tougher to scale. As a result, advertisers need to get creative and infer hyperlocation using other seed data if they want to deliver a sufficient amount of location-relevant ad locations.

One easy solution is to work with an app like Pandora that knows a user’s exact location to feed them ads, but the future of that tactic is uncertain. Pandora recently got in some hot water for delivering users’ locations to advertisers.

Jumping the Conversion Hurdle

Even once a hyperlocal ad is successfully served, the conversion to sales can get dicey. If, say, it’s an ad for Groupon and the user has the Groupon app, conversion is easy as payment information is stored and the purchase is a two-click process. But mobile browsers are trickier; in many cases, the user’s payment info won’t be automatically stored, and logging into accounts can still get dicey on mobile. That can lead users to say, “Screw it, this isn’t worth it for $4 off a burger.”

That’s why Engroff has a few key pieces of advice: Make sure your mobile checkout is extremely easy to use; make sure your technology is rock solid and works across platforms; and make sure that your ads scale.

Do that, and you’ll win the hyperlocal race.

Image courtesy of Flickr, Kyle Steed