Location as a component has always been an important factor when it comes to developing marketing strategies; however, the spatial bit of marketing and advertising has become increasingly critical in today’s digital age. With consumers that have become more discerning and researchers who have become more adept, marketing strategies have felt the need to become increasingly precise and more relevant to catch the attention of the target customers. Hence the effective usage of location intelligence is essential for making sure that the right people are seeing the right advertisements.
While it has been a few years that companies across the globe have been utilizing location intelligence for making business decisions, improving their ROI and enhancing the overall customer experience – in the 2020s the importance of location intelligence continues to grow. In fact, according to Forbes, 53% of enterprises have concurred that location intelligence is either very important or critically important for achieving their business goals.
Furthermore, the crisis of the pandemic, and now as we are experiencing the post-pandemic era, location intelligence can help companies, especially retailers garner an understanding of the purchasing patterns of customers as well as their preferences, so as to help them deliver hassle-free shopping experiences. Additionally, it can also help them in making critical business decisions, such as, whether they should move in or out of a new market, the hours in which stores should operate, how to enhance the efficiency of their supply chain, etc.
Thus, let us take a look at the ways in which location intelligence can help businesses refine their marketing strategies:
- Trade Area Analysis: Trade Area Analysis can help businesses in understanding where their customers are located with relation to a precise point of sale. Analysing the demographics of a particular area can help them profile customers, and thus it becomes easier to align sales and utilise the marketing budget areas where it is easier to reach maximum customers in the most cost-efficient manner. Accurate analysis by leveraging multivariate data can make a humongous difference when it comes to improving marketing decisions that can aid in enhancing operational performance and increasing return on marketing operation investment.
By analysing mobile location-based data, enterprises can efficiently monitor store performance using vitiation and dwell time analysis and also measure the key statistics that impact it like origin and destination analysis and catchment area. Furthermore, it can also contribute to the selection of new locations where the business has the maximum potential for growth and decrease marketing expenses while finding new customers. The mobility data also helps in understanding the behaviour and need of the customer like cross visitation and time spent in other stores.
- Predictive Analytics: Location intelligence aids predictive analysis with map-based visualisation that can reveal special dependencies or trends that would be difficult to discover otherwise. With enhanced insights regarding customer behaviours, businesses can identify cross-selling opportunities, detect frauds and risks, prevent high-value customers from leaving, and even anticipate their consumers’ needs. Since predictive analytics is a way to help organisations in anticipating the probability of any future outcomes, they help in carrying out marketing strategies that can boost sales.
- Data Visualization: With the help of data visualisation and reporting, businesses can better identify hidden trends, gain insights and understand overall marketing strategy and on the basis of that be able to enhance customer relations. When companies adopt location intelligence solutions and leverage them in innovative ways, via integration of spatial dimension for data analytics, the vast array of data that has been acquired by then, can be quickly queued, queried, analysed and displayed via maps. This allows enterprises in exploiting the data proactively through dynamic and interactive dashboards and detailed reports.
Location intelligence can help your business turn the data about customers and marketing operations into insights that can enhance its operational performance. By implementation of spatial markers, companies can move quickly from mere diagnostics to action and gain a competitive advantage while obtaining tangible results such as:
- Monitoring store performance by analysing visitation patters on hourly, daily and weekly basis.
- Understanding the cross visitation to similar stores in the vicinity
- Identification of underperforming sales territories
- Improving your pricing strategy and cataloguing to cater to the visitors
- Enhancing direct marketing conference and advertising strategies
- Understanding the catchment area on day to day basis
- Analyzing sales performances
- Increasing the retention rate of reward and loyalty programs and cardholders
- Identification of potential markets and finding new trade areas for new stores
There is an overwhelming majority of marketing professionals today, who are attributing the usage of location data in conjunction with personalising marketing strategies for creating positive customer experiences, and this is most definitely only the beginning of marketers trying to adopt spatial thinking. In today’s competitive marketplace, successful brands are listening to and trying to understand what their customers really care about. Hence utilising technology for visualising where the customers are located, by analysing psychographic, demographic, purchasing and spending behaviour for accurate customer segmentation can give businesses the advantage they need to create marketing strategies that can help them succeed.
Article is authored by Ashwani Rawat, Co-Founder & Director, Transerve.
