With an understanding of the differences between hyperlocal and its next level SoLoMo, let us look at the key elements for implementation of each of the three concepts: Social, Local, and Mobile, and the impact they generate towards making SoLoMo relevant and usable.
- Social: With consumers trusting their social circles and through their networks gathering advice about a range of issues, beginning from the cat food they should buy to the next apartment they should invest in, social technology has become crucial for most purchase decisions across the world. With social commerce gathering steam, social media now accounts for almost 8 per cent of all traffic to retail websites (according to Experian). Brands are taking help of social sites to enable social sharing of their product and content to drive in-store sales through online social interactions.With platforms like Facebook introducing tools like Facebook Graph, search marketers are getting even more interested as they are gaining a view into customer actions and interests, which is helping them design more intuitive experiences that can lead towards offline sale. Marketers can now use social media APIs to gather more information on their most popular posts, articles, pins, etc., thereby enabling them to target specific products through branded apps in real time, as soon as a customer steps inside their offline showroom.
- Mobile: With 82 per cent smartphone owners commenting that they always have their phones with them when they are in-store (according to Vibes Mobile Consumer Report), one can conclude that consumers use a mix of online–offline data to decide on most purchases, even while being within a store. With smartphone usage increasing by the day, and mobile user presence on internet rising phenomenally mobiles provide the perfect platform for data exploration.Marketers who have developed interactive apps have the highest chance to gather product interaction and consumer engagement insights to use them later for targeting. With in-app advertising gaining traction and with the rise of wearables in different forms, new iterations and placement of mobile receptors are enabling marketers to push data to customers in ways not imagined before.
- Local: Finally, with localization being the key differentiator for SoLoMo concept, the rise of location-based services offers convenience to an individual to get the best offers for a particular product or brand with in a nearby location; this is the ultimate experience a consumer looks for.With consumers utilizing their smartphones extensively during the buying cycle, looking for reviews on a particular product, checking availability, asking friends on their experiences of a particular store, it is imperative that localization will drive commerce in a huge way in the near future. In a country like India, where most of the population still prefers to buy offline but wants to check for the best offers online, SoLoMo needs to be perfected by upcoming digital marketers and brands to offer not only convenience, variety, and availability, but also combining them in forms most preferred by consumers.
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