Driving Customer Engagement with Location Based Data

Location intelligence is changing the world, yet most companies have still barely tapped its potential, if they have done so at all. Achieving optimum location intelligence rests upon the four pillars of data integrity – integrating data from the various systems that house it; verifying the accuracy, consistency, and completeness of that information; analyzing it in terms of its location context; and enriching it with the latest, most accurate data available to inform powerful business decisions.

These four pillars of data integrity work together to form a holistic platform for success in data-driven organizations. While there are a multitude of practical ways to apply location data insights for strategic advantage, this article will focus on engaging your target audience more effectively with location-based data.

Customer engagement across channels

Much has been said over the past decade about the shift to an omnichannel approach, in which businesses provide for a unified customer experience across multiple platforms. The boundaries between online and brick-and-mortar businesses have blurred. In many cases, they have disappeared altogether. The online and physical domains are no longer in competition with one another; for smart businesses, they complement each other and offer growth opportunities.

Today’s customer engagement is also highly personalized and micro-targeted. Companies that offer fitness and weight loss products often advertise heavily around the new year, when many people are making commitments to a healthier lifestyle. What if you could micro-target all those kinds of people at any time of the year? Location-based data can help you achieve that.

Customer engagement has also extended to an anytime/anywhere model. Mobile devices provide a unique opportunity to gather information about specific, defined target audiences, but they also help you reach customers with the right messages at the right time.

It all begins with quality demographic data

Effective sales and marketing is about knowing your target audience, understanding how your product fits with their expectations, and reaching them with the right messages in the right place at the right time. As one would expect, demographic data starts with the basics: age, ethnicity, marital status, income, and so on.

Additional data points can provide you with a more complete psychographic profile of individual consumers. This enables you to build lists for audiences with certain lifestyle preferences: young fashion conscious professionals, retirees on budget, or conservative middle-class working families.

A decade ago, this might have been the limit of your capabilities for audience targeting. Today, because of advanced location-based data, you can define audiences in a far more granular way.

Enter location intelligence

The widespread adoption of mobile devices has changed everything. Now you can collect highly detailed and accurate information about how consumers behave in the offline world.

Remember the earlier example about targeting health-conscious dieters? Let’s assume that you sell exercise equipment for home use. You not only compete with other fitness equipment companies, but also with gyms that charge a monthly membership fee. If you could identify a target audience consisting of people who have visited two or more gyms in the last month, you might find an audience that is interested in buying your product.

Cross-reference that list with information on income and home ownership, and you can refine your audience even further, by filtering out apartment dwellers, for example, or focusing just on higher-income prospects.

Location-based marketing

Location-based marketing enables companies to target customers and prospects by delivering the right message in the right place at the right time. A fashion-conscious consumer entering the local shopping mall could be presented with a mobile ad (including a discount for a special offer) as they enter the facility. This can take the form of a push notification using third-party apps installed on the consumer’s mobile phone.

At a slightly less granular level, targeted advertising can be pushed to digital advertising platforms based on who is in a particular area at a particular time. If a large audience of sports fans is driving past a particular billboard on game day, location intelligence would tell you that it’s a good time to display an ad for the local sports-themed restaurant chain.

Retail site selection and management

Location intelligence offers tremendous benefits for companies looking to expand to new sites. By overlaying maps with demographic and location intelligence information, retailers can gain valuable insights into potential new sites. By understanding who visits a particular area, when they visit, and how long they stay, planners can better understand the potential profitability of a proposed location.

The competitive environment surrounding the location, as well, can provide valuable information as to the market dynamics of the potential site. Overlaying the same map with competitor information provides a powerful visual representation of the opportunity.

Historically, such analysis has focused largely on residential demographics – that is, who lives in the area, how much they earn, and what is their lifestyle? With location intelligence, you can understand who visits a particular area, when they visit, and more. For locations with high inflow and outflow throughout the day, that’s critically important. An office park or downtown commercial district, for example, may see considerable changes throughout a typical day, with a much higher (and more affluent) daytime population than it has during the evening or on weekends.

Location intelligence also provides you with a much stronger foundation for managing specific retail sites. In the financial services industry, for example, Precisely is helping banks to reshape the way they set performance benchmarks for individual branches. Rather than looking at past history as a baseline for performance, each location can be assessed in terms of the actual market opportunity, the competitive environment, branch attributes, and more.

Putting location-based data to work

Precisely helps companies turn data into profitability. With our global leadership position in integration, data management, location intelligence, and data quality, Precisely has attracted many of the most successful companies in the world as clients.

Precisely offers worldwide coverage, unparalleled accuracy, and concrete experience in making practical use of big data.

To learn more read our eBook Essential Context to Business Decisions with Location Intelligence and Data Enrichment  which explores improving customer experience, automate operations, mitigate risk, and accelerate growth with essential context and loction intelligence and data enrichment.