Geotagging has become part of our everyday lives. A location is generated almost every time we update our status on social media, post a photo, send a text message or scan a QR code.
All this data is a major boon for brands, and is helping to shape the future of retail into something more personalised and relevant.
Read on to see how far geotagging has come and find out how you can integrate it into your marketing plan.
What’s new with geotagging?
Geotagging is growing exponentially. 82% of all digital data generated today contains some form of geotag. In comparison, just 0.23% of Twitter posts were geotagged in 2009.
This rise can be attributed to the growing sophistication of mobile devices. Most apps now ask users for permission to track their location.
Social media applications including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram – used by over eight times more adults than in 2005 – all rely heavily on geotagged content, including posts, images, videos and check-ins.
Business strategy has adapted to utilise this resource, with geotag brokerages offering bulk data to help companies hone their marketing strategy.
How can brands leverage geotagging to gain strategic advantage?
Geotagging can help brands gain a strategic advantage in terms of targeted marketing and streamlined operational oversight.
Customer personas
Geotagging has enabled customer personas to move from broad generalisations to individual profiles.
With geotagged data, you can find out more about your customer routine, how your customer base differs by region and assess whether a central location is preferable to one in the suburbs.
You can learn more about how your customers interact with your competitors; whether they match their default customer model, how often they visit their stores, what day or time they visit and much more.
Targeted marketing
With these enhanced customer personas, you can dispatch marketing materials targeted at small groups or even individual shoppers. This enables you to:
- Contact customers close to your store
- Incentivise customers to revisit your store
- Establish when customers are likely to be in a purchasing mindset
- Choose OOH advertising sites
Location planning
By finding out where your customers are based, where they tend to travel to and how your product or service might fit into their routine, you can re-position or open new stores in areas that are likely to generate higher levels of revenue.
Build up a profile for a location
You can also use geotagging to add depth to location descriptions. Once a branch has been registered with Google, customers can check-in and post images, videos and comments that will be displayed next to your search engine listing.
Operational organisation
Geotagging can help you figure out how to optimise the distribution of your resources between branches. It can even go beyond the customer, with geotagged products, freight vehicles and transport infrastructure to help you monitor and streamline your stock movements.
Geotagging is part of the future for today’s national and international brands. But, if it’s not intuitively interpreted in a short time-frame, then the data is essentially worth nothing.
Find out how Periscope® can help you make sense of your geotagged data and draw actionable commercial conclusions in just seconds.