How Businesses Can Up Their Game Using Location Intelligence In The Post-COVID World
As the world steers towards digitization, businesses – both traditional and emerging – seem to be banking on evolving tech advances such as AI, big data analytics, ML, and much more. Locational Intelligence (LI) is another such innovation that has recently joined the technology bandwagon and is being increasingly leveraged by most organizations across the globe.
But what is location intelligence?
In the simplest manner, it is a practice of collecting and analyzing various sources of geospatial data from large datasets – be it GPS data, footfall traffic, transactional data, or sociodemographic data – and transform these into strategic insights that businesses can use to address critical challenges.
The value of LI goes beyond displaying options to users on their smart maps. In short, it helps businesses understand their customers’ wants and needs, identify new ways to engage with them, while also providing them with greater visibility throughout the fulfillment cycle.
The Importance of LI: How it can add accuracy to pickups and deliveries
Whatever information you see on a retailer’s website associated with product availability, or deliveries/pick-ups needs to be consistent, and more than that, it should be accurate. To ensure this, it is essential for retailers to have greater visibility into the supply chain. From the manufacturer to the store and everywhere in between, visibility plays a crucial role. Moreover, it is important to gain real-time location knowledge about the current location of your customers, where next they are approaching, and what route they are taking to reach there.
How LI helps up the marketing game
While pick-up and delivery are merely a part of the entire customer journey, businesses must also look at how they can connect and engage with their customers, while ensuring that the whole shopping experience adds value to their life. This is when LI comes into the picture. With LI, businesses can get their hands on more granular, accurate, and robust location intelligence, which in turn, will help them up their marketing efforts through geo-fenced marketing strategies and eventually attract nearby customers to stores.
Simply put, by using location data-driven advancements, not only brands can identify if and when consumers are going into a store, but they can also find out what stores they are stepping into, and whether actual purchases are happening on not. Ultimately, all such advanced insights can be used to add more innovation and efficiency to the marketing campaigns and improve ROI in the long term. Therefore, using these data points, businesses can get a clear picture of where consumers live, work, play, and shop. This also helps them become cognizant of their competitors, current market trends, and finally craft and offer seamless experiences to customers.
With the constant evolution of technologies, businesses are now more aware of LI and are investing mindfully in it to shape their marketing efforts, communication channels, and customer understanding. This also helps them ramp up their bottom line and gain a larger market share in the process.
Final word
LI is rapidly emerging as an essential success tool for businesses that bolsters their operations in terms of visualizing last-mile delivery, improving logistics, or anticipating what consumers will buy and from which area. It is clear that LI has become the backbone of businesses – be it online or offline – helping them make the most of the “where” element and leading them to success.
In fact, now that we have shifted to the new world order with strict social distancing norms in place, businesses must adopt location-based insights to scale up their operations, mainly in terms of safety and sustainability. As remote working becomes routine, LI will play a key role in various stages of a business and is likely to gain more significance from both a customer’s and businesses’ standpoint.
