Location is the new pot of gold!
Location signals are a new & unique set of data now available to marketers thanks to the mobile phone revolution. Forrester predicts that the number of global unique smartphone subscribers will be more than 3 billion by 2018.
Location is a fantastic predictor of purchase intent. Marketers can look at store visit data & identify customers who may have the intention to buy a particular category of merchandise. Marketers can combine internet data, along with purchase & loyalty data & using machine learning algorithms to provide additional insights into the customer journey.
So, location data can be the new “cookies” of the offline world.
We now have over 1.2 billion telecom subscribers. Smartphone users interact with their devices an average of 85 times a day;46% report they could not live without them.
We now have in every consumer's pocket, a device, with an array of sensors for collecting spatial data. This data is incredibly valuable. Moreover, it is getting picked up from a wide variety of sources- including global positioning satellites, Bluetooth low-energy (BLE) beacons, Wi-Fi hotspots, remote sensors, and visible light communication (VLC) sources. Mobile moments are now the new battleground to engage & grow customers.
Some industries like Telecom services have technologies that allow them to pinpoint the real-world geographic location of millions of active mobile users— whether through GPS, Wi-Fi hot-spot usage or network caller-data records (CDRs). 90% of mobile users keep their mobiles within 1 meter of them 24x7. A telco may decide to share with local retail businesses general demographic information such as age groups in a particular neighborhood. This, in turn, allows local retailers to tailor their micro-marketing approach and potentially creates new revenue streams based on that third-party data. Consumers and business line owners are beginning to recognize that the insights locked in data that reflect personal usage, location, profile, and activity have a tangible market value. Almost 8 % of global daily tweets carry a location reference. That is valuable data for any number of Retail businesses.
The always-on natures of mobile devices combined with the ability to determine the precise location, give marketers a tremendous ability to create very relevant offerings for consumers. So offline & online worlds are coming together like never before. Environments that consumers think of as offline, such as malls or retail stores, have begun to use tracking technologies to improve their understanding of shopping behavior. Security camera footage feeds into software that analyzes shopper demographics; public Wi-Fi networks sniff device data and track in-store foot traffic; and some store shelves are getting "smart," with facial recognition and mobile device sensors to improve in-store messaging. Based on customers' location and other information, Walmart is personalizing shoppers' experience, both online & now in stores as well. With the acquisitions of Kosmix and OneRiot, WalMartLabs is extracting and using insights from Twitter, Facebook, and other social media to tailor search results, offers, messaging and even inventory by location.
Proximity marketing is the use of indoor or outdoor location data to interact with a consumer via their mobile device. Consumers today expect a new level of engagement from companies. They are mobile-first (sometimes even mobile-only) and expect their smartphones to add value, answer questions, and help them make decisions anytime, anywhere.
Location is a core element of a customer's context. Using location data is more critical than just capturing the attention of nearby smartphone owners — it's about powering contextual marketing. Location data will increasingly enable marketers to track the foot traffic and in-store sales attributable to their digital marketing efforts. Before analyzing and acting on location data, marketers must ensure that they have the right to collect it and can anonymize it
Your credit card company has a massive amount of data on where you, and the world, shops. Not purchases at the SKU level, they don't know what exactly you bought, but they know that you spent Rs 1350 at a furniture store and Rs 120 at a Quick service restaurant. By extrapolating these over millions of customers using visitation data they could recommend to me other establishments visited by folks with similar spending patterns. Credit card companies or banks could partner Foursquare or other Apps & make this happen. Today they do this in very non-scalable ways such as one-off marketing programs such as AmEx Small Business Week. So, combining location data & SKU level transaction data could create a great partnership!
By 2020, an estimated 50 billion devices will be wirelessly connected to the internet. Every second, 80 new objects connect to the internet for the first time. At the same time, from 2012 to 2017, machine-to-machine traffic will grow an estimated 24 times, a compound annual growth rate of 89%. The majority of data will be collected passively through machine-to-machine transactions. Although still projected to proliferate, the overall proportion of data actively generated by individuals will decline. So, a lot of data about us as customers will be passively collected without us even knowing about it.
With their Android and iOS mobile operating systems, respectively, Google and Apple know the location of every customer's Wi-Fi-enabled phone—far more location data than any other company could access. CMO's need to start thinking about these data & its customer behavior ramifications.
You can read other interesting insights here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesinsights/2017/01/19/location-intelligence-mapping-the-opportunities-in-the-data-landscape/#386677d81bc6