Locational Intelligence- The Game-changer of Advertising World

Gone are the days when advertising in the right place at the right time seemed impossible. Today, businesses are using Locational intelligence in much smarter ways than ever anticipated. By employing geospatial information to gain key insights regarding customer’s choices, behaviors, physical and online presence, and more, businesses can make more accurate predictions. This has made targeting the right audience easier and to the point.

Locational Intelligence In The Timeline

Utilizing location intelligence, however, is not something very new. It was in 1854 in London that the first true use of location-intelligence was implied by John Snow (no not from GOT but an English physician and one of the founders of modern epidemiology). He overlaid a map of the area with the location of water pumps, thus debunking the theories of the spread of cholera and narrowing the source to a single water pump. Later on, when Geographical Information System enabled experts to store and analyze the spatial data, it opened new horizons to the businesses.

In modern times, locational intelligence is being deployed to introduce driverless vehicles by automakers, while brands such as Uber and Lyft depend heavily on spatial data for better management of fleets across the globe. Undeniably, the transport sector has benefitted well, but other sectors too are now seizing the potential of spatial data for their advantage.

The question is how?

Various Sectors are Leveraging Location-Data

Marketers from almost all the sectors are leveraging location data to access better cognizance about customer shopping patterns & retail footprints. This, in turn, helps organizations create targeted campaigns and promotional programs of products and services.

Right from tracking retail performance to carrying out researches and devising a comprehensive strategy, locational data is playing a crucial role in active decision-making.

Burger King’s “Whopper Detour” campaign puts out it very well to showcase how this works. Geofencing was the main protagonist of the campaign, as the brand used it to connect with people in real-time. Whenever they got a customer with upgraded Burger King’s App within six-hundred feet of its competition- McDonald’s, the customer was offered Whopper burger for a cent. Location-based marketing enabled the food-chain brand to win over its competition, especially in a densely populated area where food-chain brands are in proximity.

An interesting thing to notice is that it’s not just the giants that are leveraging location-based marketing for shooting up their businesses. Many of the new players are much ahead in the game when it comes to leveraging location intelligence and compete with bigger brands.  For instance, a hotel booking app based out of San Francisco is smartly beating the heat of competition by predicting if the user is about to opt for another hotel nearby. Just when the time is right, it offers discounts thereby snatching away the cake of success right from the mouth of the competition.

Other few examples of businesses leveraging locational intelligence are:

  • New-York based ice-cream store Van Leween, which offered its consumers mobile payment options capable of tracking locations. To gain the benefits, customers were required to use a PayPal account for the payment. Whenever the customer with PayPal App was in the proximity of the store, the store attracted customers with exciting deals and offers.
  • Supermarket chain Whole Foods benefitted from geo-conquesting and achieved a 4.69% post-click conversion rate. The store placed geofences around the different food-store locations and reached out to the customers with special offers who passed through these geo-fences.
  • Barneys New York utilized beacons to trigger location-relevant notifications. The app used two prompts to engage customers- first asked the user to permit push notifications and second it allows Barneys to use their location to find out the customer’s proximity. On gaining permission from the customer, Barneys put forward the stock at the store with discounts and deals for the customer.

 

Reports suggest that the use of locational intelligence is going to grow exponentially. According to Gartner’s predictions, 30% of the customer interaction will be influenced by real-time location analysis in 2022, which is 4% of what was in 2017.

To conclude, location-based marketing or locational intelligence expands the scope for organizations to use digital content and engagement more creatively and at the right time. Even the costly and hard-to-track strategies like displays, flyers, or direct-mail can be revolutionized by pinpointing the locations with the influx of relevant target-consumer base. At this point, it is certainly safe to say that marketing strategies are on the path of evolution, with locational intelligence adopting the role of a game-changer.

 

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