The retail sector is continuously growing. According to Statista, total retail sales in the United States are projected to amount to 5.94 trillion U.S. dollars in 2024, up from around 5.47 trillion U.S. dollars in 2019. As we approach 2022, it appears that location intelligence seems irreplaceable and necessitates its use in every industry, especially retail.
Over 90% of companies believe location data is crucial to their success.
The global location intelligence market is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 15.2% from 2019 to 2027 to reach USD 32.8 billion by 2027. This proves the power of location! And what is the reason?
Location data acts as a catalyst for creating a more unified omnichannel retail experience. The application of LI for retail has been pushed by the rising use of mobile devices because of how conveniently people rely on mobile shopping, mobile location, making it easier for sellers to integrate location data with marketing campaigns to display shoppers with suitable recommendations at the right time.
As a retailer, you want to know who your consumers are, what they purchase, how frequently they purchase, and where they come from. Over 80% of your data has a geographic component; hence you need Location Intelligence (LI). You must be able to map your data based on its quality of location.
This is where Location data in retail helps you!
What is location intelligence?
This is a technique for extracting data from geospatial data in order to solve specific challenges in a variety of industries. Location intelligence platforms employ analytical and operational business solutions and are primarily based on geographic information system (GIS) techniques. Businesses can utilize the technology to collect crucial data sets like GPS data, transaction history, and point-of-sale data, and other business processes for in-depth geographic analysis.
Accurate contextual information on the location and movement of individuals is the foundation of location analytics. It offers demographic data on adjacent firms, including competitors, from the perspective of the retail industry. LI reveals who lives in a given region, how much profits they make, and what kind of residences they live in. It adds demographic information to the data to deliver a wealth of information concerning the consumer base.
Location intelligence also combines demographic and psychographic data to understand individual and group behavior consecutively. Retailers may use LI to understand their customers and prospects better. In the context of omnichannel retail, it establishes a critical relationship between a customer who visits your company's website and a customer who visits your physical shop.
Top 7 ways retailers can use location intelligence in retail
1. Influence retail site selection
For several years, retailers have used traditional statistical models such as census data in the site selection tactics. This may have worked well in the past. Still, given the rapid changes in consumer behavior, especially in the previous year due to the pandemic, it is vital to use more recent and constantly updated geographic data streams.
There are several methods to use location information to improve retail store location analytics and influence site selection as a retailer looks to expand to a new destination. Some of them are:
You can use dynamic map representations to illustrate population and demographic traits.
You can obtain a better picture of the overall impact for a proposed site by overlaying competing locations on top of that.
You can analyze a specific neighborhood to have a deeper understanding of the community's detailed traffic patterns.
And many more await you!
2. Better Understand Customer Demographics
Because a trade area, or the geographic area through which a retail business obtains its consumers, is critical to the sustainability of a retail shop location, your retail team must ensure that you open outlets in areas where your target customers live or frequently visit.
Location technology and data provide you with real-time information and behavioral insights about the individuals who reside and travel near certain retail sites. You'll learn more about the demographics of customers in your target market. You may also observe where consumers like to shop or go in their spare time.
Better insights about the customer base using Business Intelligence will help you provide suitable services and products that will directly impact your leads. For example, suppose you know that 70% of people in a particular area are youngsters. In that case, you can strategize your marketing accordingly and invest more in this age group because everyone in that area will prefer your shop first, and you need to be available!
3. Learn More About Customer Behavior
You can use location-based insights to evaluate consumer behavior and gain a better understanding of potential consumers. You may even use it to track people's behavior in certain regions to see if there's enough foot traffic to justify opening a business there.
A seamless customer experience is defined by reduced friction, ease, excellent service, and a high level of personalization throughout the buying path. To satisfy these considerations, retailers must create actionable insights from the data they have about their operations and consumer habits. When location analytics is integrated with the massive amounts of operational and customer data that most retailers have, they may achieve previously unimaginable efficiency, revenue growth, competitive edge, and customer experience levels.
For example, Salesforce maps is a location-based CRM that connects your mobile employees to their jobs, resulting in more revenue and improved customer experiences. This technology gives concerned team members a location-based perspective of critical customer data, allowing them to spend less time planning and more time creating meaningful, long-term relationships with their consumers in real-time.
4. Targeted advertising
While smartphones provide information about how people engage online, location technology provides information about what smartphone users do offline by displaying their physical location when linked to the network but not actively engaged in online activity.
When it comes to building advertising strategies and marketing campaigns, combining online and offline behavior is exceptionally potent. You won't lose money on clicks from clients outside your specified location if you add predefined areas to digital advertisements. You may create particular ads based on consumer behaviors and expectations when you combine geotargeting and geofencing.
5. Improved customer services
Another great location intelligence example is improved customer services using such data. The data that organizations collect has a geographical component. We usually receive a notification after visiting a specific fashion store, inquiring about our experience there. Retailers can use this information to track foot traffic in their various establishments in different areas and send out notifications to customers based on their proximity. Understanding the factors for increasing customer loyalty at the retail level would also be beneficial. LI tools can help firms improve customer service and other business processes online as well as in physical stores.
6. Highlights expansion potential
By examining areas of interest and their sales potential, location data also aids in the identification of the ideal locations. It is one of the essential instruments for market research and extensive competitor analysis.
Furthermore, it is critical to identify external factors that affect the performance of your current and projected businesses. Intelligent mapping provides business leaders with an understanding of how specific areas are changing, allowing them to maintain a competitive advantage in various industries.
7. Strategic decision making
A business strategy is developed by a company to define how it will compete at the highest level against its competitors. Any capability that significantly supports the plan is referred to as a strategic enabler. Many businesses are baffled as to how location information contributes in this way. Realizing how a strategic advantage is established is the key to finding the answer.
Having something significant that competitors would find difficult to duplicate is a strategic advantage. High-level strategic advantages include a strong brand, a low-cost structure, and proprietary intellectual property. These are valuable assets since they safeguard the company's competitive position. And all these strategies can leave you with an edge over your competitors through location analytics combined with business Intelligence via location technology because you can actually track your customers and competitors to analyze and reconsider your plans.
8. Predicting future occurrences
Marketers benefit significantly from understanding past behavior, but the ability to forecast what will occur in the future seems to be the real game-changer. Multiple organizations in the industry have already created advanced analytics - using a location signal related to a place of interest - to provide the capacity to forecast their customers' future actions or purchases. Using customer location and location-based insights, retailers can predict what customers in their locality are expected, what their potential customers like to buy, and what actually they would care to buy even at higher prices, and the list goes on!
How web scraping can help you gather location-based data for creating your retail strategy
Get accurate, validated, updated, inexpensive, and ready-to-use location data in an instant to help you accelerate business growth using web scraping. With location intelligence and web scraping tools, you may gain visibility into the retail market, including retail shop openings, store closures, parking convenience, in-store pickup options, services, subsidiaries, the nearest competitor's store, and much more.
In-depth information of new trends, competitive prices, and other location data from various sources can be availed using a web scraping service. Retailers can organize their marketing, promotions, and sales campaigns more successfully based on current client preferences.
What Web Scraping will do:
Keep an eye on the competition and uncover critical information to help you grow your market share.
Gain visibility into purchasing markets, competitors, and customers, which will help you stay on top of demand, even if it fluctuates quickly.
Collect data from the retail sector to better understand and respond to changes in consumer preferences, needs, and trends.
Find out about multi-channel retailing, smartphone apps, customer data mining, responsive supply chains, and other retail industry advancements.
To generate business leads, extract store locations from location maps provided on websites and enter them into a spreadsheet.
Get exact geographic data such as longitudes, latitudes, postal codes, city, and the number of stopovers.
Final thoughts:
With location analytics, retailers can gain a much richer view of each location's true profit potential. Retail data analytics can understand various factors like demographics, traffic, competition, store size, etc that affect a store's success. Datahut helps organizations gather clean and ready-to-use location data to further use for building their marketing strategies.
We provide location data that is 100 percent accurate, reliable, efficient, and anonymous, and we collect the specifics and deliver them to you in any format you choose. We can help you find out where your competitors are and where you might expand your business. Contact datahut to learn more.
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