by Srishti Gupta, IRI and Anita Gandhi, PlaceIQ

During the past few years, marketers have seen an explosion of consumer data. While useful, this data often comes in the fragmented pieces that make up a customer’s shopping journey, making it difficult for marketers to have a comprehensive overview of a shopper’s activity, behavior and sentiment. However, due to advancements in big data analytics and the influx of consumer-owned smart devices, it’s now possible to reach, activate, measure, and understand consumers in ways never possible before.

To accelerate a marketing strategy beyond the “micro-moments” and ignite shopper action, it’s crucial to know exactly which data points are important and how to strategically combine them. Although the sheer volume of data available to marketers can make it difficult to identify the relevant information that will drive their marketing strategy, retailers that efficiently and effectively employ data available to them can improve operation margins by as much as 60 percent. It starts with where consumers are.

Customer Knowledge Growth Curve

Thanks to the availability of transactional purchase and location data, marketers can closely observe consumer behavior and gain insight on their consumption habits. Combining purchase and location data with additional internet searches, social media and website browsing data helps marketers understand what each consumer cares about so they can be reached with unique, personalized relevant messages.

Another key attribute of digital data is the location information it provides. Location data not only creates observed data that shows where people travel on a daily basis, it also creates a linking mechanism that blends disparate data sources to create a unified, broad and in-depth view of a consumer.

A New Model of Consumer Behavior

Mobile devices are everywhere, constantly emitting signals that help brands understand consumers and allow them to zero in on crucial connection points in both the physical and digital world.

Digital data has made it possible to better understand consumer audiences, such as their affinities for certain grocery stores and movie theaters, as well as where they typically dwell or visit. The ability to understand where a device dwells and travels to, in a privacy friendly way, coupled with first and third party data, provides marketers with a holistic view of how consumers interact across channels. This linkage can then be applied across a marketing strategy (mobile, video, TV, direct mail, etc.)

Pairing mobile data and CPG data is a powerful marketing tool to provide marketers with insights into the customer-shopping journey, including the ability to use offline purchase insights to increase the effectiveness of directed advertising. The resulting insights allow brands to inform campaign targeting and align it with contextually relevant scenarios for consumers.

Six Key Takeaways for Marketers

Marketers who want to effectively combine CPG-related data with location data for better-informed marketing decisions should consider several factors:

1. Determine what data is needed by figuring out what question you want to answer.
    
2. Take stock of data that is already available to you and determine how it can be used.
    
3. Recognize and leverage data expertise across silos. Although your immediate team may not know much about location data, there may be other groups within your company that do.
    
4. Bring data partners into the process early and use their expertise to help answer the questions the data needs to answer.
    
5. Link online data to offline data using location data. This is as easy as recognizing that mobile phones are the link that allows you to analyze that data together.
    
6. Make sure you understand how the information gathered can be turned into actions.

Whether being used for season extension for a brand, selecting the right retail site or helping advertisers optimize their media plans, location data is proving its worth in helping companies understand the local competitive landscape, find their best prospective customers and learn how to fit into consumers’ daily lives.


Would you like to break down barriers between offline and online data? Want to learn more about using location data to drive and measure real world results? Contact us at Srishti.Gupta@IRIworldwide.com and agandhi@placeiq.com.