“Location is the Cookie.” Asif Khan, Location Based Marketing Association (LBMA) President.

2018 RetailLoco conference featured an all-star lineup of speakers from FourSquare, The Weather Company, Dunkin Donuts, CocaCola, Home Depot, Mizuno, GameStop, Charlotte Hornets, Hilton, and Mall of America. During this 2-day conference, marketers from North America converged to have honest conversations on successes and failures in Location Based Marketing from retail to quick serve restaurants, and big brands.

What is Location Based Marketing?

My definition of Location Based Marketing, is incorporating geographic location into your marketing campaigns.

Why is Location Based Marketing Important?

Location Based Marketing adds context to our marketing campaigns. With location, we can either send a message at the right time and place, or using aggregate data of the places users visit, we can better target our ads. BTW: 85% of all metadata already as location info.

What was the most surprising revelation of RetailLoco 2018?

Saad Khalid, Dunkin’ Brands (aka Dunkin’ Donus), emphasized the importance of having a quality product and quality execution first, or the marketing will be ineffective. Marina O’Rourke, Tropical Smoothie Cafe, discussed how to bring the franchisee on board with your brand marketing efforts. Saad went as far as to say that the digital is now influencing the physical, specifically that store layouts are now optimized to create a seamless / frictionless experience for customers who purchase with the app and pick up in store.

What was the overall theme to 2018 RetailLoco?

We as marketers can become better marketers by sending the right message at the right time. We cannot inundate our prospects with BUY BUY BUY messages while they are standing in front of grills at the hardware store; instead, we need to find creative ways to help our customers in their time of need whether it ends in an immediate sale that day or not. Branding isn’t dead! AND We are still humans marketing to humans.

What’s the next big thing in Location Based Marketing?

Experiences are the next big thing in Location Based Marketing. Augmented Reality, Virtual Reality, voice assistances including Amazon Alexa and Google Home. Becky Snider, Mizuno, provides golf, baseball, and running experiences to custom fit clubs, bats, and shoes for their flagship products. Charlie Larkin, GameStop, has combined beacons with augmented reality and virtual reality to bring video games to life in his stores.

Instead of thinking how can we SELL to a customer, how about we start thinking how we can HELP a customer and build brand loyalty?

Overall, RetailLoco 2018 was a huge success thanks to the phenomenal speakers, and organizers, Asif Khan, Aubriana Lopez, and more.