Brief:

• AGEbeautiful, a brand of professional hair color from Henkel's newly acquired Zotos International, drove 20% higher store visits with a location-based campaign by agency Media Horizons and location data platform PlaceIQ, according to news released today and made available to Mobile Marketer in advance.
• The campaign nearly doubled visits among target audiences that had recently been to a beauty salon, as the brand offered a $3-off coupon for in-store purchases.
• AGEbeautiful measured the results with PlaceIQ's place visit rate (PVR), a metric designed for real-world campaign measurement, to leverage customers' location data.

Insight:

The campaign shows how brands' use of location data extends simply reaching people in a specific area and can be used to build a profile of people based on their the locations the visit. In this case, Zotos targeted it ads to people who visited a beauty salon recently so it could deliver relevant creative and measure subsequent in-store visits. In addition to the coupon, the ad included a store locator so recipients could find the nearest store carrying the line. 

The potential marketing power of leveraging location data has led to surging interest in the space. The global location-based marketing industry is forecast to grow about 20% a year to $100 billion by 2025, per a report this month from Transparency Market Research. User privacy is one of the key challenges for location-based marketing, with its dependence on GPS data from smartphones. Many consumers deny the request of apps to share their location data due to these privacy concerns, which points to a growing challenge for marketers looking to explore how location-based information can enhance a campaign or elevate their overall strategy.

PlaceIQ earlier this year worked with Shinola, a luxury brand of watches, handbags, bicycles and accessories, to drive in-store visits. The location data revealed places that Shinola's customers visited frequently — coffee shops, jazz clubs and vegan restaurants — and helped the brand to reduce ad spend by engaging these customers at these places with localized messaging. PlaceIQ this year also teamed up with mobile marketing company AppBoy (soon to be Braze) and clothing retailer Urban Outfitters to deliver push notifications promoting party dresses to women frequenting bars and nightlife hotspots. The messages boosted customer conversions by 75% and related revenue by 146%.