Geo-enablement basically means the use of geographic data as part of another process, as opposed to geographic information being the primary purpose (as in, for example, satellite navigation.)

One such use is in customer relations management, where knowing the location of customers offering praise, complaints or queries can provide a wider insight into a company’s issues and opportunities. Companies can in turn use their geo-enabled CRM to fuel several other location-based marketing activities.

Direct Marketing

While it’s possible to use non-geographic data to isolate individual targets, this can be expensive and many marketers instead simply target geographic areas which seem to fit their perceived audience, be it a hip urban borough or a well-to-do coastal town. With geo-enabled CRM data to work with, a business has another option to pick a geographic area. For example, if a high number of complaints come from a particular region, it may be that the product is not well suited to the type of people who live there and the business may want to concentrate its efforts on other areas where customers will be more likely to enjoy the product, in turn boosting both word of mouth and repeat business.

Local Advertising

A similar process can be applied to local advertising, both on and off-line. At its simplest, this can mean targeting an area where a business already has many customers who have offered good feedback, suggesting a good demographic match. A large company with many brands can also cross-reference data. For example, a phone retailer might get a lot of complaints from high-end smartphone buyers about performance in a particular area because it has patchy 3G coverage. That could be a sign that it would be profitable to advertise a less-sophisticated model that has fewer features but can cope better with varying signal strength.

Customer Loyalty Campaigns

A third possibility comes with customer loyalty campaigns. Such customer nurturing techniques can be tricky to fine-tune, finding the right balance of offering attractive enough benefits to persuade customers to return to a store, without giving away so much value as to lose out overall. Looking at CRM data about customer activity and buying patterns can make it easier to pick an isolated test region that is genuinely representative of the national customer base.