How can location analytics help communication strategies?

Businesses face an important challenge when it comes to designing an effective global communications strategy.

Numerous factors must be taken into account such as:

• Content strategies
• Online and offline advertising
• Branding
• Target audience

All of the above are crucial to develop a strong brand presence that works consistently across all the different touch points. Nevertheless, the integration of such different areas of communication presents a problem when it comes to measuring the offline impact of online media and vice versa.

Usually gaps tend to appear between the online assets and the offline client behaviour complicating the design of psychographic and demographic customer profiles. Hence, in order to create a comprehensive and relevant picture requires being able to integrate and harmonise significant amounts of cross-channel data.

More recently, location analytics systems have been able to bring companies much closer to effective synchronisation of these elements.

Location analytics helps attain a complete view of clients in the online/offline world by:

• Enabling in depth profiling of different types of customers
• Identifying the media preferred by each type of customer
• Tracking online/offline behaviour and processes
• Providing a holistic view of the purchase funnel
• Finding new opportunities to engage with clients
• Integrating different sources of information into an unified system

These key points are the main pillars needed to facilitate the recognition of customer communication opportunities, because it simplifies the approach for targeting existing customers and appealing to new ones. By having more data that can be cross-referenced between offline and online channels, businesses are able to streamline psychographic and geo-demographic profiling, which in turn can be applied across brand touch points.

Why is it important?

Knowing your customers helps streamlining communication strategies by identifying the optimum place, time and method of reaching them online/offline. This knowledge helps determine:

• What kind of messages to use in each channel
• How to target clients in each channel
• How to optimise services at each stage of the process

Through location analytics, companies can cross-reference data in order to develop relevant communication and marketing strategies that are truly aligned to customers` needs and day-to-day behaviour.