Retail

How Location Intelligence Can Enhance the Retail Organization at Every Level

By Rus Ackner / 6 minutes

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This article was written before Cuebiq deprecated our SDK, which you can learn more about in this blog. We’ve left the following information up as it may offer offer additional insights and context.

 

Brick-and-mortar retailers are doing everything in their power to win over consumers as they go head-to-head with e-commerce brands. It’s no secret that e-commerce brands have access to a treasure trove of data about their consumers, which many brick-and-mortar retail organizations lack. In order to compete with these online brands, traditional retailers are seeking additional sources of data.

Location intelligence is a key data source retailers should consider using. Through location data, they can understand how long consumers spend in stores and how often they frequent them, to paint a better picture of the offline consumer journey. In fact, our white paper with 451 Research reveals that 81% of retailers say location data has been “very important” in improving their marketing performance.

 

Yet location intelligence does not only help the marketing department within a retail organization — it helps many other entities including media and agency partners, retail operations and strategy, inventory and merchandise, distribution, and sales and business development. Below, we’ve outlined the many ways location intelligence can enhance different departments within a retail organization, helping with everything from improving customer experiences to increasing revenue.

Corporate Marketing:

Let’s start with perhaps the most evident department for location data application: corporate marketing. From strengthening acquisition to developing better consumer experiences, location data enables retail marketers to map the complete offline consumer journey.

Co-Branding + Sponsorship Opportunities

Location analytics enable marketers to analyze offline consumer behaviors such as visitation patterns and purchase intent. This information is critical to help marketers evaluate new partnership opportunities, as they can see which other brands their consumers have an affinity toward and identify co-branding opportunities that resonate with their target audience.

Loyalty Program Development

Marketers can enhance their loyalty programs and and segmentation strategies with knowledge of consumer cross-shopping activities such as brand affinity, visit frequency, dwell time, and more.

Consumer Persona Building

In order to build more effective buyer personas, marketers can use location intelligence to gain a deeper understanding of offline consumer behaviors such as brand affinity and loyalty. This information can also inform their greater marketing strategies and communication efforts.

Competitive Intelligence

By analyzing consumer footfall, marketers can improve their conquesting and day-parting communication efforts. Ultimately, this can help them grow market share and marketing ROI.

CEM Analysis

Leveraging SDK technology within their app enables retail marketers to better understand their app users and their offline behaviors such as brand loyalty, visit frequency, dwell time, and more.

Media / Agency Partners:

Location data can also support a retail organization’s media and agency partners, by providing them with data-driven and consumer-centric insights to inform media decisions and investments.

Strategic Planning

Media and agency partners can leverage location intelligence to identify and test new audiences and media planning strategies. This in turn can help them evaluate their publishers, creative messaging, content platforms, media mix, and cross-channel investments.

Audience Targeting

These partners can also use location data to map consumers’ offline journey and path to purchase, which can improve audience targeting. Location intelligence reveals a number of new audience segments available for activation, such as geo-behavioral audiences, branded audiences, predictive audiences, and seasonal audiences.

Cross-Channel Spend Optimization

In order to optimize media spend by creative, publisher, and geo for campaigns that are already in-flight, media and agency partners can leverage real-time, daily visit, and uplift metrics.

Cross-Channel Measurement

Finally, media and agency partners can prove media ROI by measuring their cross-channel advertising performance in digital, TV, OOH, and radio.

Download Infographic

Retail Operations & Strategy:

For the operations and strategy teams, location intelligence offers accelerated growth and reduced costs — by optimizing operations with real-time, data-driven decisions.

Store Planning

Location intelligence enables operations and strategy professionals to develop custom trade area analysis based on offline consumer behaviors and visitation patterns. Not only does this help with site planning and store closure forecasting, but it also helps with measuring the impact of new competitive store openings at the DMA level.

Revenue Forecasting

The operations and strategy team can also leverage real-time consumer footfall data to forecast brand sales, revenue, foot traffic, visitation trends, and more.

Inventory / Merchandise

Location data provides real-time insights and enhanced data modeling that can help inventory and merchandise teams strengthen their resource management.

Technology Investment Analysis

These teams can use location data to measure the impact of their in-store tech investment in terms of consumer visits, dwell time, and more.

Inventory / Product Management

They can also use real-time data to predict in-store visits, which can help with managing retail stock and boosting cost efficiencies.

Allocation Planning

Finally, location data yields historical as well as real-time data, which can help inventory and merchandise teams plan for future changes such as store openings and closings, business shifts, and promotional events

Distribution

Real-time location intelligence can help distribution departments improve inventory and general distribution strategies.

Enhance Supply Chain

By overlaying offline analytics and insights into their in-house tools or data models, distribution professionals can improve planning, product development, logistics, and much more.

Distribution Partnerships

Location intelligence can also help distribution teams identify merchants to test their new products in the market or find distribution partners to generate more revenue.

Sales / Business Development:

Location intelligence can help sales and business development departments turn relationships and business opportunities into revenue, by layering data intelligence into every deal.

Corporate Social Responsibility

Business development teams can leverage location data to support nonprofit organizations and universities in their efforts to drive innovation around the globe, by solving real-world problems such as natural disaster evacuation planning.

Customer Acquisition

By analyzing offline consumer behaviors to see if they overlap with their enterprise or a similar enterprise, sales teams can better qualify prospects.

CRM Enhancement

Finally, sales and business development teams can boost their customer tool or database with offline behaviors and purchase intent to more accurately predict and generate revenue.

To learn more about how Cuebiq’s location intelligence solutions can help a retail organization, be sure to check out our infographic.

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About the Author

Rus Ackner