Since the inception of mobile devices, our lives have turned topsy-turvy.  From navigating to work to ordering food online, location-based services are helping brands offer services like locating a near-by friend, a service or availing the best deals and discounts at outlets near their vicinity.

As with every technology, deploying location-based services come with some challenges. To deploy the service properly, your IT team needs to stay abreast of the most up-and-coming technologies as the market is driven by a fierce competition, where those who don’t even possess the relevant experience or the know-how are found implementing location-based technologies.

The good news is that most organizations already have what it takes to deploy location-based services for their brand. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology is already transforming the hotel industry in the Middle East. In addition to this, every mall and retail outlet in the Middle East benefits from Wi-Fi.

The retail industry in the Middle East has already adopted the e-commerce technology. The regional retailers are implementing location-based service solutions, but they need to keep in mind some of the key features which affect the overall customer experience.

Up-to-the-Minute Analytics

The adoption of smartphones has given an opportunity for Entrepreneurs and small business owners to extract the actionable location data of their customers and provide unforgettable user experiences. This results in an operational effectiveness of brands situated across various parts of the Middle East.

For instance, a customer after joining a loyalty program discovers that their favorite products are missing from the aisle. By gathering info on the purchase preferences of your customers, you can make sure to stock up beforehand.

By providing visualizations, analytics can predict the attracting purchases, or the annoying traffic which is taking a lot of energy and time. As soon as you eliminate the element of uncertainty, sales are bound to shoot up. In the long run, startups can use up-to-the-minute analytics to scrutinize the buying patterns of their users and maximize their daily sales.

Furthermore, you can leverage products which are already in the pipeline to keep brands ahead of their competition.

Customized Navigation

As more and more customers are finding it exasperating to unearth the retail outlets of brands, map-enabled navigation can help customers find outlets without having to amble around malls. This can be an ultimate differentiator for deal-breaking your competitors.

Want to drive traffic, leads, and sales to your business?

Find-an-Assistant

Imagine this. You have an e-commerce app installed on your phone and you’re sauntering around a mall. You experience difficulty placing an order from the app when suddenly, you hit upon a magic button in the app. This is a location-based assistance button installed in all the apps that are being operated in the Middle East. Known as the Associate icon button, it sends a pre-defined text to any company associate within the vicinity.

With location-based services, employees can guide customers on seasonal sales in their area by minimizing the perennial productivity drains. Find-an-Assistant can also act like find-a-friend when an associate is looking for help. This technology can reduce the employee turnover and brand affinity. Additionally, location-based services are the key innovations when deploying bots for shelf scanning.

Tracking the assets

Most stores in UAE are using location-based solutions to track the inventory and assign tags to each item. This helps salesmen in tracking the location of that product, saving a lot of time and energy.

Here is how it works. When a customer arrives with a request for a product, the assistant can use location-based technology to find the location of that item and present it to the customer instead of returning empty-handed.

This is just one way in which tags are helping brands address the personalized requests of customers. Others include quickly locating a ladder to get items off a shelf or finding carts capable of handling bulky merchandise.

Recently, Proxera – a proximity marketing app – came to us for their website development. We created the website in record time. And this opened a lot of location-based solution opportunities for us. Previously, we only delved into corporate branding and mobile app development.

Beyond these applications, location-based services can offer a host of other benefits. In addition to staying competitive today, deploying such infrastructure will reap rewards as innovations evolve for years to come.

Location-based services are not new, but it’s going to change how businesses grow. So, as we move forward in a highly competitive market, we should ask ourselves: Are you ready to leverage your location-based marketing to roll up your sleeves and learn, or will you outsource the greatest opportunity to transform your business?

As we’ve noticed that geo-location marketing has a substantial long-term growth in the coming years, but on the other hand, there are challenges such as precise targeting, customer experience, and efficient customer analytics which demand constant improvements in the future.