Real Estate Marketing & Beyond
If you have an eCommerce business model, you have the entire internet through which you need to attract some customers to make the sales to get ahead. If you have a physical store location, though, or more than one, you have to use different advertising strategies. That’s when you need to start learning about and utilizing location data.
Location data is a catchall term that basically means information indicating someone’s location when they use a smart device. There’s hardly anyone that doesn’t have a smartphone anymore, and as a business, it can be helpful to try to target a potential customer who is close to your physical location. If you can advertise to them at the right moment, that might be what it takes to get them into your store.
You can collect location data from smartphone users that are close to your physical store. When you do so, you can interpret and analyze what their intent might be.
You should understand that when someone is walking down the street or driving down it in a vehicle, they’re probably not doing so for no reason. They had an intention when they left the house: you have to figure out what that is and whether you should spend money advertising to them.
Just because a person is close to your business, it does not necessarily follow that they will make an ideal customer for you. You don’t know whether they are looking for precisely what it is that you sell.
There are ways to make your targeted ad campaigns more successful, though, and you can do that by purchasing data models from entities that sell them. There are various companies that collect data based on where an individual goes and what they buy or search for when they get there.
If you buy a customized audience from one of the companies that collects their data, it’s much more likely that if you advertise to them, you can get that sale you crave. You can buy an audience based on very precise specifications, and when you do so, you can watch your sales numbers rise.
Before you buy a target audience from one of the entities that collects data and creates them, you can relate to that company exactly who you want to sell to and what qualities they should have. Presumably, you will have done some research to figure out who is most likely to buy from you, based on things like their age, their income level, their gender, ethnicity, and so forth.
Once you give the company those target audience specifications, they will sell you the data for those individuals that they have collected. People might not necessarily realize this or think about it, but their smartphone tracks them wherever they go. It also collects information about what they buy when they get there.
In the past, much of advertising was guesswork. Look at TV commercials, for instance. You could create a TV ad for your company or one of your new products, and you could set it to play during a show that you felt like your target audience would probably watch.
This targeted advertising worked to a certain extent, but it was far from foolproof. Using location data is much more likely to work. You not only have used analytics to create your model customer, but you also have purchased customized audiences that perfectly fit that model.
You know who those individuals are that are most likely to buy from you, and you know that they sometimes come within a few blocks of your physical store location. At that point, all you need to do is send out a targeted ad at the right moment.
You cannot state with one hundred percent certainty that this person will buy from you, but it’s pretty likely based on their past behavior. That’s the essence of using location data and buying customized audiences: you’re playing the percentages, and studies show you can get more sales this way.
Predicting human behavior is possibly the most crucial part of marketing. Now, you have companies that can sell you the tools so you can predict human behavior more accurately than you ever could, even in the recent past. If you use location data, your sales numbers should increase.
