As you’re completing your planning cycle and figuring out your advertising strategies for the coming year, here is something you should consider: 2019 needs to be the year that you truly leverage location intelligence.
It’s really no secret to digital marketers that online behavior only accounts for a sliver of how consumers live, act and buy. Brands need a window into people’s real-world actions if they want to understand the actual customer journey, because it now takes place seamlessly across online and offline channels. That’s where location intelligence comes in.
Understanding where consumers spend time and their cross-shopping activities is critical to gaining insights into their path to purchase and their ongoing product and shopping preferences. This data can also be used to help you with competitive intelligence and market share analysis, giving you the ability to identify areas of growth and activate those insights to drive brand performance.
But that’s only a portion of what location data can do. Let’s set the stage for what brands can be putting into place over the next 12 months. As you’re planning and executing your annual program, here are three key areas where location intelligence is going to play a more important role this year.
Cross-channel measurement
Running a cross-channel campaign is one thing. Accurately measuring and gaining a true view into your cross-channel media investments is quite another. It requires a currency that can be used to compare online and offline channels transparently and truthfully.
For 2019, let’s make “visits” that currency. Most campaigns—no matter what channel they’re delivered on—need to actually drive someone to take an action and go to the place where a product can be seen or a purchase can be made—a car ad needs to get someone to visit a dealership and take a test drive; a beer ad should get someone to go to the store and purchase a six-pack.
Visits can be the way to understand the performance of each channel with an apples-to-apples comparison. This will allow you to measure cross-channel ROI and then use that learning to refine and optimize your media mix for both ongoing and future buys.
Predictive analytics and audiences
Data’s power not only comes from being able to analyze current behavior, but in its ability to forecast future actions. You need to be able to anticipate customer needs and deliver the kinds of experiences that deepen the overall customer relationship. That’s why predictive analytics has become a must-have for marketers.
How does location intelligence fit in? By leveraging high-quality and historical location data at scale, location intelligence can enable brands and marketers to predict the future behaviors of consumers in the physical world. You’ll be able to go beyond seeing where they’ve been, but get a clearer picture of where they’ll want to go. And that kind of continuous feedback gives you the unique advantage of being able to keep your campaign a step ahead.
Predictive analytics can also give you a window into the shifting needs and desires of consumers. Again, location data can identify shifts in brand or category preferences and help you predict shifts in the journey that identify important areas like customer churn and competitive conquest.
Footfall attribution for TV
Two things every marketer probably knows about TV today. First, TV remains the most powerful ad channel, particularly for brands looking to increase awareness and build equity with consumers. Second, TV media is increasingly looking like digital media, with buys focused more on actual audiences instead of things like age/demographic proxies.
What this means is that advertisers are under greater pressure than ever to measure the impact of their linear and advanced TV buys. As they build out their 2019 plans, they’ll need to know how specific campaigns targeted at specific audiences drove actual, measurable results. And one of the most effective ways to close the loop on the customer journey and identify the moments that lead to an actual purchase is by measuring footfall traffic.
At Cuebiq, we kicked off the year by launching our TV attribution solution. We are now able to understand the impact of TV and cross-channel advertising on in-store visits, giving advertisers an idea of how the media mix that includes linear and advanced TV impacts the customer journey to brick-and-mortar locations.The solution is already being used by leading QSR, automotive and home improvement brands.
As you face the next year, take a page out of predictive analytics and identify what you need to ensure that your ad campaigns perform and drive the results you expect. Location intelligence is going to be critical to the customer-centric, actionable data that’s going to fuel your 2019 success.
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Valentina Marastoni-Bieser (@VBieser) is the SVP of marketing at Cuebiq.
