Why Location Intelligence is Essential for Retailers?

retail location data

The retail market today is somewhat contradictory.
More consumers are demanding more personalization - delivering the right content, at the right time, and place – yet retail operations are growing more globally apart.

That’s precisely why so many retailers around the world are turning to location analytics - the use of a highly accurate location-based data, to unlock previously hidden consumers’ insight.

Location intelligence is becoming crucial for marketers in providing better audience targeting, actionable audience insights, and measurable offline attributions.

What is Location Intelligence?

Check out our previous blog post: Location Intelligence: The Power of Where

Today we look at how Location intelligence is addressing retail’s greatest challenges.

Retail’s Top Five Challenges:

Improve ROI
Increase Sales
Control Costs
Increase Customer Satisfaction
Improve Customer Loyalty

1. Improve Return of Investment (ROI)

To stay competitive and successful, retailers constantly invest in their products, services and people. Consumers, on the other hand, are keeping their wallets tight, and are more likely to reserve their hard-earned money for those retailers that continuously offer optimal value for their money, quality and service, especially during times of economic difficulty - with growing numbers of well-known retail chains suffering a very public decline.

This is when ROI becomes very critical, and how location intelligence and analytics can be extremely powerful here.

Knowing where to invest
This means understanding where your business has great potential and where it may be under-performing - fast. This is where location intelligence shines.

Combining the right data with a very accurate location information, retailers can invest precisely on where it needed most. For example, by using heat mapping, we can zoom in on investment “hotspot” at a glance, saving hours flipping through spreadsheets and tables.

Knowing how to invest
Forecasting your investment results will also greatly reduce your risk. With the latest location-based data and analytics system, running through intelligent business modeling tools, the process is far more accurate and reliable. A single system of data spanning across the entire organization with multiple geographical locations provides consistency. This allows various investment scenarios to be tested and predict ROI with a high degree of accuracy.

Sharing Business Case
When it comes to sharing your business case and getting the board to buy-in for your investment, it’s never been quicker to share that information, as data is easily accessible on virtually any platform. This keeps everyone on the same page and direction - lower your risk and provide you with the best chances of achieving the much-needed ROI.

2. Increase Sales

Consumers spending tends to fluctuate constantly and retails will be hit the hardest when they strike. To maintain sales is a challenge, and to drive growth is tougher. However, many retailers see growth as a possibility, as long as the investment is made in a targeted way.

Target Product development, targeted marketing

By adding customer data into accurate location information, retailers can understand precisely which customers want which kind of products and services, in exactly which locations. Using this insight, retailers can make a positive decision on investments, either in new or updated product lines, store refurbishments, or even open brand new store to serve high demanding sites.

This same detailed location-based data can then be used to target related marketing activity to specific individuals via the most suitable channels and locations. In addition, since you are using accurate data for your campaign, you will be able to measure its success better, which can later be used for further analysis.

3. Control Cost

Reducing costs is nothing new in retail businesses. With today’s retail organizations spanning across multiple geographical locations, huge chunk of cost-related data is often buried in spreadsheets and hidden in IT systems across different offices.

More detailed cost analysis

By using a centralized location-based analytic system, retailers can visualize their performance by layering business intelligence onto location-based intelligence. This enables retailers to identify “hotspot” of underperformance or inefficiency - quick identification of correlations and patterns between different data, digging out hidden sources or trigger of cost. So you can flag issues before they become costly.

4. Increase Customer Satisfaction

A happy customer always brings businesses. It’s always the quality of service that pushes the customers to choose one retailer over the other. Every retailer needs to find a way to stand out from the rest.

Getting to the root of the issues

Location intelligence can offer rapid insights into customer satisfaction, allowing proactive actions or measures to be taken. This offer more personalization which helps build customer loyalty and boost retail profits.

5. Build Customer loyalty

Customer loyalty is always at the top of the retailer’s agenda, as it’s far cheaper to keep existing than find new ones. Besides loyalty cards, which capture customer preference and habits, location data analytics can offer more targeted loyalty building activities.

Enhanced customer profiling

Combining geographical location data like, where customer live, what they buy and where they buy it from, with data like, the point of sales information, online activities, transaction, social data, etc, generates more comprehensive customer profiles. Integrating all this information helps you to hone customer-focused initiatives. With that, you can analyze the effectiveness of your campaigns across segments and model-specific improvements.

Invest today, protect your business into long term

Location intelligence offers untold value and great potential for retailers in the long term. The industry is moving into an era of scientific retailing - using data and insights for more efficient business decisions.

By using location-based data in the heart of your businesses, you can see exactly how your retail stores run, identify where you are over-, and under-spending. Together with a clear, versatile map data that underpins it, it’s far easier to show data and prove your compliance to customers and stakeholders.

How Our Retail Solution can help you overcome these challenges?

Moving Walls is a media technology company headquartered in Singapore, with a presence in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Africa and the U.S. We operate Moving Audiences, an AI-powered location intelligence platform that brings transparency and automation to out-of-home media via Planning, Buying, and Measurement tools.

We had recently acquired Quad42 Media, India’s leading digital signage management platform.

As digital screens become a ubiquitous part of physical spaces, the addition of Quad42’s strong presence in retail and place-based environments is aimed at creating the next wave of programmable digital signage.

For more detail about our Retail Solution: Click Here