“Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business.” — Dale Carnegie
Dale Carnegie would have been pretty excited about how far science and technology have come since his days in helping businesses “deal” with people. In this post, we will focus on the rapid advances in cloud-based tech and cutting-edge data management platforms that have ushered in a new era of location intelligence for businesses and brands. Integrating this technology has boosted business growth and brought precision into how marketers understand customer behaviour. The end result is campaign personalization at a level of accuracy that is unprecedented. A boon for brands and companies who thrive in the physical space.
A huge buzz surrounds e-commerce consumer trends, but a far bigger story that we need to focus on is the fact that brick and mortar stores grew faster than e-commerce in the year 2021, with physical stores growing at 18.5% versus e-commerce growth of 14.2%. In this post we will address the physical store industry and how our marketing solutions connect brands with Out-of-home (OOH) audiences with great accuracy enabling advanced personalization. Location intelligence helps you understand your customer like never before in marketing history.
This accuracy is based on the capabilities of advanced location intelligence to generate data that you can use to build and execute strong and personalized marketing campaigns.
Location intelligence backed personalization is a force multiplier worth reckoning—and in today’s competitive market, a business essential. Over 70% of consumers consider it a basic expectation. Organizations with the ability to build and activate the capability at scale assign customer lifetime value on a new course—pushing double-digit revenue growth, superior retention, and richer long-term associations.
And the cost of getting this wrong- compounds.
The Risks of Failing to Understand Your Customers
A recent Mckinsey report is pretty blunt about personalization.
Consumers consider a personalized experience indispensable. The pandemic showed that customer loyalty is essentially fickle. Roughly 75% of consumers experimented with novel purchasing behaviour, and over 80% of them intend to continue with their decision. What we are witnessing is a massive change in consumer behaviour- in short consumers are willing to shift to businesses that connect with them. Consumers are proving this by their choices. Over 76% of consumers stated that receiving personalized communications was a key factor in promoting their consideration of a brand, and 78% said such content made them more likely to repurchase. For many businesses, especially for stores, getting personalization right is vital for reviving and regaining store and product loyalty.
Then there is the issue of competition, falling behind and market leadership. In the US market alone, companies that excelled at tapping personalization gained 40 % more revenue from those activities than average players with half-hearted attempts. The expectation is that across the States, shifting to top-quartile performance in personalization would generate over $1 trillion in value. Players who are leaders in personalization achieve outcomes by tailoring offerings and outreach to the right individual at the right moment with the right experiences.
Accurate personalization is turning out to be a powerful competitive tool. The question that naturally arises is how can brand owners avail this. Personalization is largely a data-driven product with degrees of accuracy depending on the skill and experience of the team. A critical factor determining accuracy is the integration of location intelligence data to digital behaviour and context to understand consumer behaviour.
Location Intelligence-Driven Data Presents New Branding Opportunities
Location intelligence provides external data that complements the data you have generated within the organization’s ecosystem like customer’s transactional data, human resource data, etc. Commonly known as internal data, it does not give you a complete picture. Especially, if you are trying to answer questions like-
- As a retail brand owner, you will be curious about the income data of the people at place X to make a more informed site selection decision, or
- As an FMCG brand owner you will like to pinpoint the right geographies for extending their distribution network, or
- As a food delivery or a restaurant brand, you will see the value in using weather data to predict rains to better comprehend its impact on demand.
Data related to affluence, demographics, lifestyle and movement pattern of people around particular geography fall under the location intelligence-driven data category and help brands know their customers well in addition to their company-related data such as CRM information.
Location driven external data is not easy to access. However, market leaders across the world leverage it to gain deeper and newer insights to maintain their advantage.
Key Types of Location Intelligence Data
Human Mobility Data
Human mobility is central to uncovering human behaviour patterns and individual habits. In physical space, human mobility refers mainly to the route of human movement. The sources of human mobility data are usually GPS data, mobile phone data, and WiFi data.
A range of insights can be derived from human mobility, from the spatial distribution of movements, use of public transportation, level of walkability, pollution emission in a region etc. The interesting part is the commercial scope. Organizations can track real-time foot traffic to get a clear picture of the average expected population in an area on a given day. This is exciting for the Ooh industry for obvious reasons and even the retail industry can massively benefit by careful analysis of this data. Another scope is understanding how the population in a particular region usually mobilizes. You can see the density of roads or rail connectivity in the particular region and chart routes of interest for your campaign.
Economic Data
Internal data of the banks combined with geospatial data gives insights that help them scale their business as well as serve their customers better. But as we can see, these datasets are largely industry agnostic. The level of economic development as understood as per the data helps brands decide on expansion activity for their businesses. Income and affluence of people (i.e, the purchasing power) help companies figure out which brands or commodities should be offered to the population residing in a particular region.
Now the information on affluence and income level can be extracted from parameters such as:
- Infrastructure: The average dimensions of structures in a territory or the number of people living within a particular circumference.
- Points of Interest: The number of ATMs, shops, restaurants, and stores in an area.
- Competitive Advantage: Enterprise activity and growth can be tracked and hence gives you an insight into who your competitor would be with your current customer base.
- Property loan details: This information can be used to evaluate the value of the surrounding commercial property values and also have a good idea about the risk and the probability of loan repayment.
Demographic Data
Demographic data provides a layered understanding of the characteristics of a populace within geography. It can be used spatially to highlight patterns that can help answer vital business questions.
Analyzing demographics in an area helps us understand challenging questions like — How old is the population of a place? How educated is the population in a place? How is the population varying over time?
Weather Data
Weather data plays a strategic role of huge consequence within industries such as real estate, logistics, food delivery and sharing economy. Combined with internal data, the insights can help organizations take measures to improve business resilience.
Food delivery and ride-sharing companies leverage weather data along with their internal data to handle the demand for services when it fluctuates with respect to sudden changes in weather conditions (sudden rain, gusty storm). The prices also increase to meet the existing demand.
This type of data is largely dependent on satellite imagery. Data can be extracted from standard satellite imagery to predict cloud formation, infra-red imagery to investigate low light & night-based weather activities. Tools like water vapor indicators pinpoint moisture levels in the atmosphere above certain geographies to predict the intensity of rain and other conditions.
How do you make the shift to location intelligence and create value?
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It is essential to lean into data and analytics tech to identify opportunities. It is of immense importance to understand that for stores accuracy comes from combining digital behaviour, context and physical behaviour. The last is indispensable to understanding the geospatial behaviour of potential customers- key to greater accuracy.
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Think about customer segmentation based on location. Utilize the refined data generated to tailor the messaging of your brand’s campaigns towards the region, city, or town, known as marketing localization. Localization, however, isn’t just about adjusting the messaging language; it also includes understanding what products or services appeal to consumers living within a particular location. Advanced audience targeting allows personalization at an individual level too.
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Understanding has to lead to execution. Investment in data pipelines and data management platforms that help with the integration of analytics, and models, builds the capability for rapid execution and scalability.
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Build your marketing department’s capacity to track emerging customer trends. They can then craft campaigns that adapt to these changes. Customer data enriched with location intelligence can correlate foot traffic data with sales or other trends to see changes over time. This insight allows marketers to know how customer behaviour has changed and adapted their products or services to those trends.
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Utilize data driven parameters for your campaign strategies. Customer data analysis done with location intelligence allows businesses to compare differences in consumer behaviour at their own locations (or even their competition’s locations). Foot traffic patterns can be compared to see which locations are getting the most business or how long customers spend time at each location (also known as dwell time). Invest in enriching consumer data. Predicting customer behaviour is possible with quality customer data from a variety of datasets.
Hashbrown Advantage- We Build Tech That Helps Businesses Grow
Location intelligence is redefining the way we approach marketing campaigns. With location intelligence technology developing more personal, contextual campaigns and branding activity is a reality and is fast achieving the status of marketing 101. The result is that your message is relevant to the audience and transactional for the brand.
We build sophisticated digital products so that our clients can execute innovative and market-leading brand building activities. We understand the science of data and the business of gaining customers. Our clients consider us as partners not only because we deliver technological solutions but also because we go beyond helping them build location-based campaign accuracy.
We help you reinforce brand relevancy
One of the harder things is to get the attention of customers. We generate high-quality nuanced data and processes that enable interactive customer experience with your brand, and with the inbuilt means to learn more about them with great precision and empathy. The latter is possible largely because we pay great attention to timeliness and utilitarian customer benefits. This drives engagement and uplifts brand experience and overall exposure.
We help you build your audience
We help you generate different audiences, learn about their movements, where and what they consumed, where they live… We are able to read this data with more granularity and cross-link it with Points of Interest (POIs). All these locations and data evolve in a context that impacts the motivation and reaction of your potential audience. Our technology can ingest different datasets, correlate them and identify the areas and behaviors that we can leverage. These high-quality processes enable audience mapping, geospatial analysis and identifying similar locations in another area to create campaigns and predict similar results.
We help you build ‘connections’
You can understand the audience from an attitudinal perspective: about their motivations, interests and attitudes. We can track users to understand their shopping behaviors and their routines. This helps us with the capability of leveraging all the steps in the customer journey and highlighting the time, location and even the best weather suitable to target specific customers with very high granularity.
We build your capacity
Customer personalization is a powerful catalyst for business growth. It is possible due to the data we collect and the process we build around enriching data, deriving insights, building campaigns, execution, feedback and adjustments. This entire structure can be streamlined and turned into an integral process of the organization. This is our vision- to help organizations avoid treating tech as ad-hoc or an experiment, but more of as a core strength of a rapidly growing organization.
The use cases for location intelligence data are of massive consequence, and brands that are able to leverage this technology efficiently evolve into powerful brands that can have meaningful customer engagement. We have the capabilities and the technology to help you achieve that for you. We encourage you to test us.
