There is a geographical element to the data that organizations collect. About 80% of data has the location component; hence, many businesses consider location intelligence crucial. This data has the potential to generate location intelligence that can be used to make better decisions, enhance customer experience, and optimize their business processes.
Here’s everything you need to know about location intelligence.
What is Location Intelligence?
Location intelligence (LI) is a method of collecting insights from geospatial data to solve specific problems across various industries. It is primarily built on geographical information system (GIS) tools to provide analytical and operational business solutions. The technology helps businesses and governments gather key data sets, including GPS data, transactional data, and point of sale data used for in-depth geospatial analysis.
Businesses can analyze various situations and complexities to provide solutions to a particular business issue. Several companies rely on GIS technology to leverage location intelligence. One of the main benefits of GIS is that it helps organizations in finding new opportunities and optimizing operations.
What is Location Intelligence Software?
Location intelligence software is mainly built for organizations to collect and compile a significant amount of data, analyze it, filter it, and use it for making business and operational decisions. Location intelligence software is a business intelligence solution used by data scientists and location intelligence analysts to see trends on maps to optimize several business opportunities.
To understand one scenario related to location intelligence software usage, data scientists can use them to analyze consumer behavior for a particular area and decide whether a shop should open its new branch in a specific area.
What Are The Top Location Intelligence Use Cases?
Location intelligence is used by organizations from various industries to improve their business processes. Click here to learn more about top LI use cases.
Some of the top location intelligent use cases are
- Delivery management
- Field sales management
- Supply chain optimization
- Field service management
- Market analysis
- Fleet routing and tracking
- Data visualization and mapping
- Geo marketing
- IoT and smart cities
- Indoor mapping
Location Intelligence Trends For 2024
Also Read: Check our blog to see top location intelligence trends that will shine in 2024.
Benefits of Location Intelligence
Here are some of the key advantages organizations can gain from levering location intelligence.
1) Enhance Your Business Intelligence
Location intelligence is a form of business intelligence that is an amalgamation of location and business data. It helps in enhancing a company’s business intelligence with several location-specific data sets. Companies that derive new value from their data are more likely to be leaders in their industries and experience rapid growth, according to a recent McKinsey Global Survey on data and analytics.
2) Analyze Your Customers
By 2022, 30% of customer interactions will be influenced by real-time location analysis, up from 4% in 2017, as per a Gartner report. Organizations can learn more about customer interests and activities with location intelligence data, which can help create detailed personas for sales, marketing, and customer service. When used with a customer relationship management (CRM) system, those personas help provide relevant communications to customers and prospects.
3) Find Expansion Opportunities
Location intelligence data also helps identify the best locations by analyzing areas of interest and their sales potential. It is one of the essential tools used in conducting market research and doing detailed competitive analysis.
Moreover, it plays a crucial role in pointing out the external factors that impact your current and potential establishments’ performance. Intelligent mapping gives business leaders an idea of how specific areas are changing, helping companies maintain a competitive edge across a range of industries.
4) Improve Customer Experience
Location intelligence tools or platforms, coupled with the vast amounts of operational and customer data, help organizations enhance their customer experience. Businesses can use location data to get valuable insights into consumer interests and preferences. For example, retail stores or restaurants can offer its customers beyond the regular points of interest or geofenced marketing offers with more accurate and powerful location intelligence. This helps in increasing brand loyalty and improving customer relationship management.
5) Attribution
As location intelligence data is based on real-world actions, businesses can connect online activities to offline behaviors. They can use LI to connect mobile advertisements to offline foot traffic in shops, restaurants, and other commercial locations.
They can study changes in their foot traffic data to mobile advertising campaigns to understand which advertisements work and which ones don’t. Retailers and their marketing teams can harness the power of LI analytics for planning successful marketing outreach.
Artificial intelligence, coupled with LI software, can help marketers in personalizing the customer experience. Location intelligence offers companies insight to make better decisions and increase ROI in the future.
Which Industries Use Location Intelligence?
Some of the most common industries that use location intelligence software are
- Retail – After we have visited a certain apparel store, we typically get a notification asking how our experience was at the store. Retailers can leverage this data and track footfall of their multiple stores in different areas and set notifications for customers in terms of the proximity. It will also be helpful to understand the reasons for increasing customer loyalty at in-store level. Besides offline stores, LI tools can also assist retailers in improving customer service online.
- Quick service restaurants – Quick service restaurants (QSR) can get in-depth insights about each outlet’s customer experiences. This will help them compare each outlet’s performance for better ROI. LI analytics can help QSRs understand the trends and patterns in consumer behavior for various locations and allow them to provide a better user experience.
- Logistics – Location intelligence helps transport and logistics companies in identifying traffic patterns and improving route optimization for field service agents.
- Healthcare – LI can help healthcare companies with site planning and supply chain management of pharmaceuticals.
Factors to Consider for Selecting Location Intelligence Software
Following are key factors to consider for selecting the right location intelligence software:
1) Discovering Useful and Contextual Data
Collecting detailed location data can be an overwhelming task as it involves new technologies and talent. Once the data is collected, it is further essential to contextualize that location data to garner more meaningful insights.
Few businesses collect their data; however, high-end data cleansing techniques often eliminate a significant amount of data signals.
2) Ensuring Data Quality and Accuracy
As location-data is a crucial factor in decision making, it needs to be accurate, complete, and up-to-date. Businesses need to ensure that they choose a reliable location data provider to make an informed decision. It is also important to find out how frequently the data is updated as it directly relates to finding an opportunity to identify potential customers.
Inaccurate and insufficient data can significantly decrease the effectiveness of any campaigns using location intelligence. Optimizing your marketing campaigns is not easy with incomplete data, which translates into higher customer acquisition costs.
3) Using Transparent Data Sources
It is essential to ensure that the data derived from location intelligence software is well-sourced. Some data providers have little transparency about their data collection. Companies focused on collected spatial content data need to ensure they are working with the right tools. Moreover, finding the right talented workforce that encompasses the right skill sets is vital to harness the power of location intelligence data.
Besides having appropriate analytics tools, companies need to have the right people to run this analysis.
Final Thoughts
Over the next few years, the use of location data is going to become more prevalent. An IndustryARC study reveals that the location intelligence and location analytics market is expected to reach $16.43 billion by 2021.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
1) What is Location Intelligence?
Location intelligence is a merger of your location data with business intelligence. It is a system that helps companies find robust business solutions.
2) What is The Difference Between Location Intelligence And Business Intelligence (BI)?
Location intelligence is a critical component of business intelligence. It is referred to as a form of business intelligence. BI mainly highlights temporal data, while LI focuses on location-first analyses.
3) What is Location Data?
Location data refers to geographical data collected from mobile devices that we carry over time. It is primarily collected and tracked by GPS via a particular network like a smartphone carrier or services like a mapping application.
4) Which Industries Can Use Location Intelligence?
Nearly all businesses collect and save location data. Industries like Retail, BFSI, Insurance, Logistics and Transport, Restaurants, Pharma, Education, Public sector, Hospitality, and others can leverage location intelligence to expand their business.
5) What Does Location Intelligence Offer?
Location intelligence offers key data-driven insights like customer footfall in malls and restaurants and consumer behavior. It helps companies gain a competitive advantage when it comes to making strategic business decisions.
To know how you can leverage location intelligence for your business, why don’t sign up for a demo. It will take less than a minute. You can also check out our e-book about the importance of LI in the FMCG and retail sector.
