Make more of an impact than ever before with the help of physical-world insights
Consumer trends can be quite the paradox. They’re often hard to nail down, amorphous in nature, and can rapidly change at any moment in time. However, trends also provide us with valuable insight into the direction of where something is headed and supply us with a guideline that can be leveraged in order to fuel predictions and strategic business decisions.
In the world of marketing, understanding consumer trends are more important than ever before. These insights influence our approach and power our strategies by providing us with a window into the minds of our consumers. Our ability to understand consumer behavior, especially physical, real-world behavior such as path-to-purchase, visitation patterns, day of week preferences, and daily activities is crucial to our success.
The Data You Likely Know
Most marketers remain pretty well-versed in their consumers’ online behaviors, i.e. activities such as consumer purchases on your site, the pages they click on, the products they view, and other online consumption patterns. These activities are more accessible than ever due to tracking pixels, website cookies, and advanced online analytics platforms.
The Data You Likely Don’t Know
On the f
lip side, the real world can look very different than the online world when it comes to consumer behaviors. Think about the day in the life of a consumer: They wake up, make a pit stop to grab coffee, head to work, shop for groceries on the way home every Monday, go to the gym three times a week, and so on. These repetitive activities build a very strong picture about people; their daily routines, their interests, and their needs. So, the question begs to be asked: How are you leveraging this information to enhance your marketing efforts? If you’re not currently using location technology to fuel your marketing strategy, then chances are you haven’t been able to effectively capitalize on this valuable treasure trove of data.
Making the Unattainable, Attainable
With Gimbal Trends, you’re able to leverage location-based insights from real-world behaviors opening up bountiful opportunities to better inform not only your marketing strategies, but decisions across your entire business. Trends provides you with actionable insights, effectively arming you with a comprehensive view of consumer offline behavior in order to power data-driven decisions.
The data behind Trends is powered by Gimbal’s always-on Location SDK, embedded in thousands of top consumer-facing apps, and collected passively in the background with user consent. This rich data can inform not only whom to get your brand’s message in front of, but also when and where to target them. The insights can additionally allow you to increase customer retention rates, gain an overall deeper understanding of your customer base, drive higher sales, and make more effective decisions for your business.
Furthermore, with the use of Trends, marketers are able to leverage behaviors that may be out of routine, yet still powerful moments that can signify interest. For instance, let’s say a consumer takes a different route home from work one day, decides to shop at a new grocery chain that just popped up, or makes a new pit stop based on their path home. With Trends, even fluctuations such as these, when in mass, can be leveraged to provide meaningful insights.
All For One, One For All
Location Insights As a Menu Add-On
Companies of every size and every industry can benefit from the wealth of physical-world data provided by Trends. For example, let’s say you’re a QSR and after analyzing location data, you find that there’s been a recent spike in customer dwell times at one of your locations. This could potentially be a problematic situation, especially for a business that runs in an industry where efficiency is paramount. Information as such may indicate that there is a staffing issue that needs to be resolved. Thanks to real-time data, this issue can be addressed immediately rather than later after it’s already impacted numerous customer experiences and ultimately your bottom line. Restaurants can also leverage location technology to aid in efforts to test new store experiences. For example, if you’re considering outfitting your locations with additional seating or patio seating, you could measure dwell times and find that an increase in such times actually correlates with the fact that consumers are positively responding to your decision.
Trying On Location for Site Selection
Retailers can benefit from the use of location insights in numerous ways as well. For instance, let’s say you’re scouting various locations for the placement of a new brick-and-mortar store. Trends can help provide insight into the best site for your business by analyzing foot traffic in areas of interest. You can begin to optimize site selection by choosing areas that show the highest density of foot traffic based on the data that is collected.
Adding Location to the Lineup
Companies in the entertainment industry can also leverage this rich data to optimize decision making. If you’re a music and/or event-based company, you could analyze and compare various concert venues in terms of popularity and even gain insight into the preferences of individuals. This can all be accomplished by measuring foot traffic and visitation trends at each venue. This information can then be harnessed to gain greater insight into concert goers’ preferences and music tastes in the region by tracing data back to specific dates and performances.
Cashing in on Location
Financial institutions on the other hand can leverage location intelligence to optimize ATM locations. In such a competitive industry, strategic placement of ATM locations is essential to ensuring a great customer experience. Your institution can leverage mobility data to analyze foot traffic trends and install additional or new ATMs in high-density areas thus increasing accessibility and convenience for customers.
Make the Most of It
Many marketers use real-time location data for targeting and measurement, however the truth of the matter is that location intelligence can do so much more. Marketers should instead view this data as a strategic asset which can be leveraged for a multitude of business purposes.
Consumer trends can be fleeting and ever-changing, but these moments of routine can also provide us with important information on consumers, their preferences, their behaviors, and their needs.
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