Establishing customer intent is key to optimising the ROI of your marketing activities.
Relying on demographics or sales data alone gives you a 2D picture of your customers’ intentions. Combining these sources with location data provides a 3D overview that can help you identify key points in the customer journey and reach out to customers when their need is greatest.
Here’s an overview of why customer intent is so important and some ideas for integrating location intelligence into your marketing strategy:
Why is knowing customer intent so important?
Getting to grips with customer intent can help you increase profitability in several ways:
- Choose the most relevant times for dispatching marketing content
- Optimise the location of adverts
- Influence purchasing decisions by offering timely deals and discounts
- React to changing consumer behaviour
- Save money on marketing to dead leads and uninterested customers
Before the digital age, establishing customer intent was simple. If you were visiting a store or making a call, you were likely to be overtly interested in a product or service.
But now, if a person visits a website, subscribes to a social media feed or searches for specific keywords on Google, intent isn’t so clear. Location intelligence helps fill in the blanks by collecting data on their current location and historic movements, which are far more indicative of intent.
How can I use location intelligence to figure out customer intent?
Intent falls into four categories. When customers touch base with your brand, they either want to:
- Know
- Go
- Do
- Buy
As a marketer, it’s your job to establish intent and give them the resources or encouragement they need to move towards making a purchase.
It doesn’t matter where they enter this process, or which steps they take, as long as they continue moving down the sales funnel to their desired conclusion.
Some of this insight will be implied by their online movements; have they visited a product page multiple times, added a product to their basket only to remove it later on etc.? But, that’s only part of the picture.
Here are some examples of how location data can help you establish customer intent.
Intent of car customers
A person searches “Car from Fast and Furious”.
If they’re at home, they might be watching the movie, searching for reference purposes and land on the Toyota website by chance.
If they’re close to a Toyota dealership, then you can be relatively confident they’re thinking about making a purchase and would be receptive to a timely ad.
Sports clothing customer intent
A clothes retailer wants to increase sales of sports clothing.
If a majority of customers already purchasing sports clothing visit a nearby gym shortly afterwards, a billboard could be strategically located nearby. This ad could position the brand as passionate about health and lifestyle, therefore encouraging more sales in this area.
However, if they recognised that these customers were spending more time at home after making a purchase, they could switch their strategy to focus on sports clothing as loungewear. This could be promoted via an email campaign, as it’s more likely to reach this demographic.
There are innumerable innumerate examples of how location intelligence can help you establish and react to customer intent. You just need software powerful enough to process these insights.
Discover more about what makes your customers tick and tailor your marketing resources for success with Periscope®.