The Major Benefits of Location-Based Consumer Insights

In the past few years, the message that mobile is growing and marketers and advertisers need to adapt has been heard countless times. In fact, just searching “mobile growth” in Google will return pages on pages of relevant articles on the topic.

No one doubts this is important information, but we’ll let you in on a secret that not so many people are writing about: consumer insights are changing; marketing and advertising professionals need to adapt. Some consumer insight trends to look for in 2015 include the following:

• Mobile strategy is important
• Big data will be more important now than ever before
• GPS location is gaining popularity
• Information needs to address what consumers want “now” at all times
• Marketing and advertising strategies need to be flexible, helpful, * quick, responsive, and convenient

The thing is, though, all of these predicted trends for this year and beyond can really be summed up into one thing: location-based consumer insights.

Before we get into the detailed benefits of location-based insights and how they can improve the effectiveness and efficiency of marketing or advertising campaigns, let us explain our previous statement. Location-based insights allow business professionals to make their mobile strategy the best that it can be, these insights are big data, they come from GPS location information, and most importantly, they allow strategies to be more flexible, helpful, quick, responsive, and convenient by giving the knowledge needed to target consumers with the right information at the right time.

Now, let us discuss in more detail the benefits of using location-based insights to drive your marketing or advertising campaign efforts.

Why Location Is Important

The majority of consumer insights that companies use to influence their marketing and advertising decisions currently come from customers’ buying habits online or in stores, surveys, and observing buyers’ journeys first-hand.

Whether it is realized or not, the success of one’s efforts are limited by targeting consumers from this information alone. Think about it: consumer insights gathered this way come from patterns expressed from no more than 30 minutes of a consumer’s day, which translates to targeting one’s customers based on a 2.08% understanding of their total behavioral patterns expressed during a 24 hour period.

With worldwide advertising spend expected to reach $600 billion this year, it’s worth it to make sure the money spent on advertisements and marketing campaigns is based on more than a 2.08% understanding of one’s consumer.

Accurate Consumer Insights

Location-based consumer insights allow professionals to understand 100% of their consumer’s purchasing journey. This information yields more valuable information than one may have imagined it could, such as where customers go before and after they visit a store, what competitors they’re visiting, and where they frequently shop and reside. With this information, rich consumer insights can be drawn.

Let us give a sample scenario: there is a supercenter like Walmart that uses location-based insights to inform their advertising decisions. By understanding consumers from a location perspective, they know that 20% of your target market consists of health conscious mothers with babies.

This insight was drawn upon the fact that these buyers frequent at Babies"R"Us, beauty salons, gyms, and Whole Foods. With this information, the supercenter has the ability to send targeted, hyperlocal ads to these mothers when they are within a certain distance of the store for goods such as fresh, organic produce and baby supplies, such as the Pampers diapers that are hypothetically on sale this week.

As one can imagine, an advertisement to the right market at the right time with the right information, like the one above, is much more successful than one without location-based insights build into it.

This leads us into the next benefit of using location-based insights as opposed to traditional consumer insights: increased goal conversions.

Goal Conversion

Location-based consumer insights allow individuals to increase goal conversions by using increased consumer targeting based on a deeper demographic understanding and hyperlocal sensitivity. Think: lower cost, higher quality.

With hyperlocal ad offers, an advertiser can be reassured that their ads are reaching the right people. Hyperlocal ad offers therefore are more effective and increasing conversions from clicking on the ad, to visiting the store, and finally, making a purchase.

Earlier, we mentioned that consumers want to be targeted with helpful and convenient messages? Well, a highly targeted local ad does just this; we know it provides recipients helpful information from our location-based consumer insights and it’s convenient due to the hyperlocal nature of the ad. In addition, customers will be more likely to respond to future ads positively if they trust that the content provided to them is relevant and important to their needs.

A/B Testing

While increasing goal conversions is a great start, A/B testing with hyperlocal advertising and marketing campaigns will allow for consumer preferences to be narrowed down even more. Product offerings, CTA placement, and distances from retail locations that you deliver the ad are all variables in a campaign that can be tested.

Doing A/B testing in light of location data lets business professionals discover which aspects of an offer consumers find to be the most appealing. These “winning” components can then be combined to create ads that yield the most conversions.

Overview

We hope this article has shed light on some of the benefits of incorporating location-based consumer insights into an existing marketing or advertising campaign.

It’s amazing how easy it is to increase a ROI by targeting the right people. Providing relevant, helpful knowledge to people when they need and want it is what converts advertising clicks into purchases, and this is all made possible with location-based consumer insights.