The rising cost of travel has made location-based services like online maps more valuable to the consumer. Underscore Marketing's president examines what this might mean for your brand.
With the price of gas in the U.S. continuing to move past comfortable territory, I’m planning trips more carefully. Next week, I’ll be towing a 28-foot camping trailer with a truck that already gets questionable gas mileage from my home to a county park on the east end of Long Island, and you can bet I’ll do quite a bit of trip planning to make sure I’m not wasting any more gas than I need to.
The interactive age has made this much easier. More popular, too. As a society, I don’t think we’ve ever been as acutely aware of where we are, where we’re going and what to do along the way as we are right now, thanks to web-based services and mobile devices.
On the dashboard of my pickup truck is a Garmin Nuvi 780 GPS receiver. Not only does it show me where I am at any given time and give me turn-by-turn directions to any place I’d like to go, but it also provides a ton of location-based services as well. At the touch of a button, I can call up a page on this device that shows every gas station near me, what direction I need to head in order to get there, and the price of regular unleaded at that station. I can also find movie theaters and times, and even reserve tickets through the device, track traffic conditions, or find a Wal-Mart on my way to wherever I’m going. All of this is provided by MSN Direct, a service from our friends at Microsoft.
If I’m not traveling in my truck, my BlackBerry has the Google Maps application on it, which integrates with the GPS in the device to provide all sorts of location-based services. Sometimes, though, just knowing where you are at a glance is a big help. Just this morning, I was passing through a neighborhood via the Long Island Rail Road and took note of a beautiful Tudor-style house. I might have wanted to take a look at real estate in the neighborhood. Problem was, I was on a train and had no idea what neighborhood I was passing through. A quick glance at the BlackBerry told me I was in Forest Hills, NY.
A lot of different kinds of information can be expressed through maps: weather, traffic, retail locations, tourist attractions -- even conditions for leisure activities like surfing, boating or camping. We can even create maps out of data that are only meaningful to ourselves. (Check out this humorous video for an example of what I mean.)
In typical internet fashion, the data sets are portable, and people don’t want to wait for all the usual suspects to make the maps they think are most useful. So you get a bunch of geeks playing around with map data and platforms, and sharing the results of what they put together.
What does this mean for marketers?
If you’re in retail, or if your business has brick-and-mortar locations that are dependent on foot traffic, it means not just placing the obligatory map of store locations on your website. It means being easy to find. Make sure Google knows where to find you. It wouldn’t hurt to submit your locations to other search engines with local plays as well.
More importantly, though, it means letting people play with your location data a bit. Consider making your location data available in XML format, so that people can use it for whatever custom applications they care to develop. It’s impossible to anticipate the informational need, so just provide the data in a flexible format. Let’s say you’re Baskin-Robbins and there’s a guy out there who wants to build a map of every ice cream parlor within five miles of a KOA campground. You’d probably want to make that easy for him. For all you know, he’s printing them out and giving them to fellow campers.
If you’re a content provider, this has ramifications, too. The Weather Channel has been selling things like pollen and UV index data feeds to allergy medicine and sunscreen marketers for use on their own websites for a long time now. A non-commercial license for data feeds can help get their brand out there and drive incremental traffic to their website, particularly if people really start playing with the data and sharing custom maps with one another.
It’s a game of data portability, and if you want to keep your brand alive with the consumer, it’s time to give away location data.
Tom Hespos is the president of Underscore Marketing and blogs at Hespos.com.