Location Intelligence – The Key Ingredient in Your Recipe for Success

If you’re reading this, it’s likely that in the space of the last few hours you’ve checked your emails, skimmed through your news/social feeds, sent text messages and perhaps made a phone call or two. Elsewhere in the day, you might have searched for a recipe while standing in a supermarket aisle or perhaps shopped online for clothing. This is typical of today’s omnichannel, interconnected world.

Movement from one channel or device to another happens seamlessly and subconsciously, and the information we seek is so readily available that it’s usually more surprising when we can’t find what we’re looking for. This is the age of the consumer – and to connect with modern consumers, you’re going to need to use location intelligence (LI), regardless of your industry. That’s right, ALL B2C brands can benefit from the use of LI.

Location strategy explained

Today’s prospects are empowered by connectivity, and they’ve come to expect hyper-personalised engagements in comparison to advertising which simply screams from the rooftops. Brands that don’t meet these expectations can end up disenfranchising their customers, who won’t even have to make the effort to look elsewhere – because their competitors will already be targeting them via LI.

Let’s take, for example, a company which sells ingredients. Imagine this company has successfully implemented location intelligence into its marketing repertoire. This company can serve a digital display advertisement with a scannable coupon for a key ingredient at the exact point that a busy professional is looking up a recipe on their smartphone in a supermarket. Impressive, huh?

Believe it or not, this is not magic – it’s location intelligence, and competitive-minded businesses are fast becoming dependent on it. Brands can leverage location intelligence from geographic information system (GIS) technology via smartphones, connected cars, wearable tech and more. This allows businesses to take physical surroundings into account and develop a location strategy to deliver those hyper-personalised engagements we discussed earlier.

Getting to know your customers with LI

Understanding the wants and needs of your customers is crucial – and with location intelligence, your brand, regardless of which industry you reside in, can find out:

• The things that separate your highest-value customers from the rest
• How far your customers are willing to travel in proximity to their homes/places of work
• When and how high-value customers are most likely to engage with your brand

Whether you’re operating a small restaurant or a chain of grocery stores, these insights can help you to appeal more to your target audience by:

• Customising/personalising your advertising
• Redesigning menus or store layouts to appeal to high-value customers
• Tailoring your offer to your key demographics (such as using fair-trade ingredients or products)
• Developing an online community around your brand which appeals to prospects who fit the same criteria as your existing audience

Can my organisation use LI?

Put simply, it’s not a question of if your organisation can use location intelligence, it’s a case of how and more crucially – when. Companies which fail to adopt customer-centric, insight-driven strategies are going to struggle to keep up with their competitors by 2021.

It may seem like a bold prediction, but we only need to look at how businesses across all sectors – from the simplest to the staggeringly complex – are using LI to engage with consumers. Now is the time to consider how to successfully implement location strategy into your current marketing offer, and the tools you’re going to need to achieve this.