The term ‘location intelligence’ or local digital marketing has been gaining popularity in the marketing realm as of late, and not for no reason. Location intelligence opens up a number of useful and innovative marketing avenues, and marketers are increasingly taking advantage of this.
Before we dive into how you can make use of location data and analytics to better your local digital marketing, let’s take a look at what exactly constitutes ‘location intelligence’, in order to get a better context of its applications.
Location Intelligence is a part of business intelligence and makes use of consumers’ location data to derive context about a business’ target audience and use it to drive marketing. For example, retail establishments can make use of RFID or Bluetooth beacons to track the frequency of a customer’s visits to the store. They can then combine this data with a particular customer’s purchase history to create customized loyalty programs.
There are plenty of other applications to location intelligence, but in this article, we’ll take a look at some of the most effective ways you can use it to boost your local digital marketing.
Target Your Audience Better
Location Intelligence gives you useful insight into the everyday lives of your target customers. Businesses can make use of location SDKs such as Rippll to create highly accurate buyer personas that provide information such as:
- Frequency of visits to your store
- Lifestyle and shopping choices (whether they stick to a specific store for shopping, or usually visit several stores)
- Favorite brands
- Products in which they show the most interest
- No. of times they visit your store vs. a competitor’s store
This information can not only help create customized and highly targeted marketing strategies but also increase your ROI by targeting your audience at the right times.
For instance, if you run a multi-brand retail store that also sells products from brand X, you could set up a geofence around brand X’s nearby store(s), and run targeted deals for people who cross the geofence. This could be in the form of push notifications or app pop-ups that let your target audience know that they can get a better deal for the same brand, in your store.
Moreover, you can also use location data to gain insight into how much time a person spends in your store, and in which section/department. This can also be used to craft personalized offers and loyalty programs to better your repeat visit rate and customer retention.
Using Spatial Behavior
In the previous point, I spoke about how you can use the location data that you collect from your target audience to refine your buyer personas and reach out to them at the right time. But there’s another aspect to location data that can help you take advantage of your target audience’s movements, to further refine your targeting and increase conversions. This is where spatial behavior comes in.
Spatial behavior gives you insight into potential customers’ movements, and not just when they enter a geofence. It tells you what their daily commute looks like, where they prefer going for shopping, dining, etc. But how does this help you better your ROI?
When it comes to using location data to target potential customers (hyperlocal marketing), you would usually make sure that they fit your buyer persona (age, gender, proximity, interests, etc.). But what this method lacks, is an actual insight into their spatial behavior, and this can affect your ROI.
For example, let’s say that there are two women, A and B, who check all the boxes in your target profile. They live close to your store, they’re the right age for you to market your products/services, etc. Ideally, when using hyperlocal marketing, you would reach out to both of them.
But what spatial behavior could tell you, is that miss A very rarely travels near your store, even though her house is close by. Her office, friends, and favorite restaurants are all on the opposite side of town, and that’s where she spends most of her time. On the other hand, spatial behavior can also tell you that miss B works from home, and passes by your store more often than miss A.
Without the use of spatial behavior, you would probably be wasting money and resources, marketing to miss A, who’s unlikely to visit your store. With insight into their spatial behavior, you know that you will have much better returns, targeting miss B instead.
There are online tools such as this one, which you can make use of to gain these insights.
Gaining an Edge Over Your Local Digital Marketing
This is one of the most rewarding uses of location intelligence, specifically, geofencing. Marketers can set up geofences around their competitors’ stores. This can be used to trigger location-based offers, deals, and ads to draw in your competitors’ potential customers to your store.
This is especially effective during the holiday season when shoppers are more open to trying out new stores and retailers. This gives marketers an amazing window of opportunity to influence the purchase decisions of their target audience by showing them the right deals at the right times.
For example, if you own a store that sells both menswear and womenswear apparel, you could put up a geofence around local stores that sell either menswear or womenswear. This way, you could set up your ads and push notifications so that potential customers visiting menswear stores would get deals on men’s items and vice versa.
These are three of the most effective ways in which you can give a huge boost to your digital marketing. Brands like these are already getting way ahead of the curve when it comes to putting location data to good use, and are reaping the benefits.
That being said, you have to make sure that all your marketing methods and materials are GDPR compliant, and are not invasive. In case you’re just starting to use location intelligence to power your marketing, you can even start small by measuring and analyzing metrics such as search views, direction requests, calls to business, etc. An online tool like Synup could be very useful when it comes to local analytics such as these. Additionally, you should also see to it that your business’ local SEO is on point, in order to deliver a smooth customer experience right from the first online touchpoint to the sale.