In the age of customer-centric experiences, it’s more important than ever to understand the actual relationship between your brand and your consumers. After all, it’s one thing to recognize that people are visiting your stores and purchasing your products, but it’s quite another to identify the value they put on the bond they have with you.
We call this consumer compatibility.
This isn’t anything new and it has formed the basis of customer loyalty and brand affinity for generations. What’s different today is the ability to measure it and gauge its impact on actual bottom line results.
What’s important to understand is this isn’t just a digital thing. Certainly, ecommerce channels are increasingly important to all brands. But the customer journey remains predominantly offline. Most shopping takes place in physical stores. That’s why your analysis needs to accurately incorporate how consumers interact with your brand locations, from measuring in-store visits to how consumers behave while in store.
Here’s where location analytics comes in.
At Cuebiq, we leverage the world’s largest, most accurate and privacy compliant location-based database —giving you unprecedented vision into the offline consumer journey. It essentially gives you the ability to map your consumers’ path to purchase and identify areas where you’ll be able to enhance loyalty and long-term value.
Let’s see what this looks like.
Make sure visits are really visits
Measuring footfall traffic can tell you whether a consumer has entered a particular store or visited a particular area of a larger retail outlet. It gives you a picture of your brand’s share of visits, as well as that of your competitors. These kinds of trends are useful to understanding things like when consumers are engaging with your brand, where their shopping journey takes them and what they are doing before and after they interact with you, helping you gauge interests, behaviors and activities.
But how accurate is the footfall traffic data you have? There’s a lot of noise to a lot of location data, which might pick up what we call “false-positives.” For instance, people walking near or around a location might be counted as visitors. But just because they pass a store doesn’t mean they’ve entered. And even if they’ve entered, it doesn’t mean they’ve actually engaged with the experience.
To understand your brand’s consumer compatibility, you need to accurately measure visits. At Cuebiq, we measure visits with our double-verified approach. First, we leverage the accuracy and precision of our location data to establish a visit to a POI (for many other providers, this is their first and only step). Secondly, we determine the dwell time for each visit to filter out the noise of other consumers who may be merely passing by or may be just passing through.
This double-verified approach will tell you if a visit is a real visit and whether or not the journey was in line with what you would expect for your brand. If you’re a major coffee chain, a visit with a 5-minute dwell time—especially during commuting hours—might be great. If you’re a sit-down restaurant, a visit that lasts only 5 minutes might identify a disappointed customer and could signal something like an unhealthy churn rate.
The impact of your outreach
Accurate location intelligence also becomes your view into the overall effectiveness of your brand narrative. Great CX requires your brand to craft a story or position that engages your customers and allows them to see you as more than just someone hawking products and services. But is your overall messaging really resonating with your ideal target?
Again, the answer will lie in offline behavior. By combining location analytics with cross-channel media measurement, you’ll be able to see if your ads had an impact on offline foot traffic. Again, by using dwell time to double verify visits, you’ll be able to understand if your media spend is generating the desired consumer behavior.
With these types of insights, you can then take the necessary steps to optimize campaigns, plan adjustments and make the necessary changes to your future planning to increase the value of your investments.
You’ll also be able to become more strategic in areas like site selection. Are your stores in the right locations to reach the kinds of customers who make up the most loyal segment of your audience? Or you can flip that around—are you actually targeting the right audience to drive traffic to the locations you already have?
It all comes down to a rich and accurate picture of your target consumer’s unique journey. With location intelligence, your marketing can become more efficient and more powerful because you’ll know how your brand is performing with your target audience. That’s really the key to actually understanding what drives consumer loyalty and measuring your brand’s consumer compatibility.
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Valentina Marastoni-Bieser (@VBieser) is the SVP of Marketing at Cuebiq.
