A Cheatsheet of What MarTech Industry Experts Had To Say About Using Location Data To Better Serve Your Customer Base 

‘Location Data Is Tying Digital Spend To Offline’

Gladys Kong – CEO, UberMedia: Despite the rise of e-commerce, the majority of real-world business outcomes still occur in offline environments beyond the reach of digital attribution models. Mobile location data is closing that gap.

In the last few years, UberMedia has released multiple innovations linking business efforts and results to actual location visits from consumers. These products include Location Visit Optimization (LVO), a system that dramatically boosts relevance and performance of mobile ad campaigns based on real-world location visits; Location Return on Investment (L-ROI), a first-of-its-kind key performance indicator measuring and optimizing mobile media against offline store visits; Cross Media Location Visit Rate (xLVR), enabling marketers to understand their incremental foot traffic lift and market share gains and losses across all media investments; and Optimal GeoSpace, a patent-pending mobile location technology that dynamically renders a customized virtual fence around individual retail shopping areas, enabling retail marketers to fully capitalize on the actual footprint of a customer to their location (or a competitor’s location).

In June, we announced the launch of Vista, the most comprehensive suite of data analytics tools for businesses of every size to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses through the lens of real-world foot traffic analysis, shopping patterns, and customer insights. Providing a panoramic view of actual business performance, Vista reveals in-depth analysis of consumer foot traffic behavior across industries by leveraging one of the largest mobile generated location data sets and the most precise location identification technology currently available.

Vista is a critical brand diagnostic tool that provides marketers with a clear visual on how well their brand is competing across key markets, verticals, and media outlets. This includes category-wide location analyses and consumer insights, ranking the performance of specific brands in the marketplace. Vista’s mobile location data analysis is helping businesses evolve to enhance services, address challenges, and plan for the future, including which locations they should open (or close) to attract the largest amount of foot traffic.

These are just a few examples of how location data is tying digital spend to offline activity in a way that gives marketers and businesses a more complete understanding of the entire customer journey.

‘Location As A Means To Hyperpersonalize’

Nathan Kontny – CEO, Highrise: How do you leverage behavioral data and location analytics to hyperpersonalize email marketing? For starters, don’t send the same email to everyone. The needs of someone who is in the process of setting up a Highrise account are different from the needs of someone being invited to participate in a Highrise account. That’s why we send different welcome messages.

However, I think the whole hyperpersonalized message is a bit overhyped. What’s more important is actually trying to make messages more “personal.” Most of us can smell how email is so robotic now, and we can spot the email templates from a mile away. I know I’m getting it because hyperpersonalized robots decided it’s time for me to receive it.

We differentiate by personalizing those emails every single day, changing our templates to include details about that very day. I talk about things like how my weekend was and what my three-year-old is up to lately. Our customers are crazy about the personal welcome videos we send, using a tool called Bonjoro. We can’t send everyone this type of message all the time, but we try to fit in as many as we can, and the engagement is incredible.

‘The Bigger Picture Of The Device’s Journey’

Rami Alanko – Founder and CEO, Beemray:  Location data should not be considered merely as coordinates of a device. Coordinates do provide a precise point of a device but the interesting thing is the context; where did that device come from, where does it go to, what is happening around it, what content it consumes in that particular location and is the location a random place or a part of a behavioral pattern. If one looks at location from various angles and as a part of a bigger picture of the device’s journey, the odds are that you get interesting profiles, even the kinds you did not know you have.

So if you then have the capability of analyzing a device in realtime in its full context, it provides a path to various use cases ranging from ad targeting to content personalization. Retargeting based on the location-based profiling is naturally an obvious one but I think it gets more interesting and engaging when realtime capability is introduced to provide better user experience in the correct context.

All this requires a willingness to think out-of-the-box and to experiment but the improvement of marketing efficiencies desperately needs new approaches, with location playing an increasingly vital role.

Read More: Trends in Marketing Technology Budgets Could Impact Data Quality and Hygiene

‘Where And When The Customer Is’

Judge Graham – Chief Marketing Officer, Ansira: The proliferation of social media is very evident in our daily lives. People are much more inclined to want to understand socially how brands fit into their lives — they read reviews, engage with tweets, use company hashtags…

Using data to drive informed digital media and social is a cornerstone of reaching customers, and it will continue to be. I think that people today trust social mediums more than they do other media avenues. Social is the new way to reach customers where and when they want to be reached.
The main challenge of connecting data and marketing is implementation. Everything is possible for an organization, but if you don’t have the right infrastructure and architecture technologically, it is nearly impossible to implement campaigns in a successful way that reaches customers.

‘Adding Spatial Measurements To Data’

Javier de la Torre – CEO, CARTO: Mobile marketing has been one of the first verticals to benefit from new streams of Location Data. Leveraging real time location data streams of user locations allow for better targeting of users for advertising and geomarketing. Today, the same data, but aggregated and anonymized is what we are using for creating what we call a real time census. Instead of doing analysis based on 10 year old census data, now we can have data that is 15 minutes old, having higher precision and accuracy than ever before. This is going to change the way we solve location problems and optimize solutions dramatically. All of it started with mobile marketing and social media platforms, now we are taking it to the next level.

CARTO Data Observatory is built on the idea that accessibility to data is essential for performing spatial analysis. A main step in the Location Intelligence formula is enriching your data with spatial measurements so that you can contextualize your own data and analysis with information about specific locations. For example, analyzing demographics, income, employment, and real estate data of where your customers are can help you identify similar areas with untapped client potential. Having an up-to-date index of location data enables our clients to perform not just spatial analytics, but also predictive modeling and prescriptive planning by suggesting the best way to optimize for a site. The more data we bring in the smarter it becomes.

Our Basemaps are another service that offers up to date data for contextualizing data in space. CARTO basemaps are synced with OpenStreetMap to make sure the most accurate road and building data is represented, and our styles lend themselves to a wide range of uses from creating stunning maps, to practical applications for real estate and routing.

‘Create Audience-Specific, Campaign-Based ‘Hero’ Content’

Ed Bussey – CEO, Quill:  Technology is fundamentally changing consumer expectations of how brands should communicate with them, and as such, winning custom is no longer just about who has the best brand or even the best products, but rather who can also deliver the most relevant and seamless start-to-finish user experience, across all devices and channels.

Whilst these new expectations have created a more challenging and complex environment for brands, marketers also have greater access to better data than ever before on their audience segments – whether that’s simple location data, device usage data or nuanced information about their behaviours, and interests. Supported by this wealth of data and creative agencies, it is, generally speaking, quite straightforward for marketers to create audience-specific, campaign-based ‘hero’ content that drives brand awareness – for example, highly targeted advertising campaigns.

However, looking further down the purchase funnel, when it comes to creating the fundamental, critical content that converts browsers into buyers, like product descriptions – which are often required on a massive scale and at high speed, while maintaining brand tone of voice and audience relevancy – this is a real operational nightmare, and as a result such content is often neglected. This, in turn, has a huge negative impact on ROI on all marketing spend further up the funnel – no matter how Cannes-worthy the advertising campaign, if consumers are faced with sub-standard content at the point of purchase, they are far less likely to buy.

Recommended Read: What We Learned From MarTech CEOs in 2017