3 Ways to Use Location Data in Digital Advertising

July 18, 2019

Location data, or information on where consumers go in their day-to-day lives, is becoming a popular tool for enterprises. It’s used in a variety of ways, including for customer analysis, real estate selection, and digital advertising.

Advertising, in particular, is one of the fastest and easiest way for businesses to start using location data. In advertising, location data helps brands understand their consumers and narrow targeting to deliver ads to the most relevant, ready-to-buy consumers. There are three key ways to use location data in advertising.

Location Data in Digital Advertising

3 Use Cases for Location Data in Advertising

1. Creating Detailed, Accurate Personas for Ad Targeting

Location data collects real-world information on the top customers for different businesses. That information provides insights into what customers are interested in, allowing marketing and advertising professionals to build personas that help them improve offers, messaging, and ad copy.

Take a grocery store, for example. The grocery store can gather location data on its best customers, tracking where they go before and after shopping at the grocery store. If they find that over half their customers visit the gym before shopping for groceries, they can create highly-relevant ads that suggest healthy food and drink options for their customers.

2. Identifying Lookalike Audiences

As with the personas use case, location intelligence helps businesses determine the interests and behavior of their top customers. If there are specific characteristics that are common to top customers, such as being interested in fitness, businesses can use location data to find other consumers who are also interested in fitness. That creates a ‘lookalike’ audience of new prospects that are likely to engage with advertisements.

The best location data companies provide services that help businesses identify the key characteristics and interests of their top customers. They’ll then build custom advertising audiences for businesses that directly target lookalike customers to improve customer acquisition.

3. Targeting Competitors’ Customers

Location data isn’t limited to just a single company’s customers. Companies can also choose to collect location data on their competitors’ customers, learning about their interests and behaviors as well. An advertising audience can be built on that information, allowing companies to directly target their competitors’ customers in marketing and advertising campaigns.

Location-based competitive intelligence tools might include advertising audiences as well as data on foot traffic to competitor locations, behavioral analytics for competitors’ custom bases, and competitive analytics.

Location Data Can Improve Advertising ROI by Up to 600 Percent

Enterprises have been taking advantage of location data for marketing and advertising campaigns for years. TGI Friday’s partnered with a location intelligence company to improve its reputation as a post-event gathering place for mobile consumers.

Location data helped the company identify customers at other casual dining restaurants nearby, as well as people who regularly attend youth sport events and wine tastings in the area. In the end, TGI Fridays achieved a 600 percent ROI, an 8X higher click-through rate (CTR) than a standard digital campaign, and positioned itself as the top post-event venue for mobile consumers in the lucrative target age group of 20-35. Download the case study for more details.

Businesses in various industries, including hospitality, automotive, retail, and financial services can leverage location data to achieve similar improvements in ROI and CTR.

Is location data an opportunity area your company is missing?

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