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Today’s consumers are mobile. Thanks to the use of connected devices, we can harness location data that give us a much more granular view of how people behave and move. Treated correctly, this is a gold mine of business intelligence that most companies still aren’t utilizing.
Benefits of Mobility Data
One of the benefits of mobility data is that it provides you with real-time, up-to-date business intelligence as opposed to static census data. In our fast-moving world, static data quickly gets old and can thus lead to erroneous conclusions and resulting economic losses. When used correctly, mobility helps allocate resources more efficiently for increased growth and cashflow.
So how can we use mobility data for smarter decisions? Let’s look into some of the applications!
Increased accuracy
Mobility data is dynamic and up-to-date rather than static and potentially outdated. Higher accuracy means better predictions of future patterns, which is the foundation for smarter investments and leads to higher revenue.
Spot relocation trends before your competitors
With mobility data, you can identify areas where the population is increasing or decreasing – something that is useful for real estate agencies and to identify attractive locations of stores/venues.
Imagine this competitive edge! It’s like having access to a live camera while your competitors are analyzing a still image.
Points of Interest
A Point of Interest (POI) is a location that many people visit following specific patterns: either routinely, such as daily or weekly, seasonally, such as a ski lodge or beach venue, or related to certain events like sports events or concerts.
By using a POI close to the location you consider for opening a store, a restaurant, or another kind of venue, you can track how many people pass by. You can use this as a benchmark for metrics like the expected number of visitors to optimize resources.
Furthermore, you can look at POI data to identify how your competitors are doing in terms of number of visitors and dwell time (competitive intelligence).
Conversion rate
When you know how many people pass by your location, you can use that to calculate the organic conversion rate. This is the rate of how many people that pass by your venue that turn into customers. If this metric is low, that could be because of your on-site marketing and visibility or because your ideal customers are not visiting the area.
Catchment area
The catchment area helps you see where your visitors come from. Are there any nearby public transport stations, parking areas, shopping malls or similar? This could give guidance in strategic placements of signs and publicity. Also, people are only willing to travel limited distances from their homes or workplaces to buy food or gas. Insight into mobility data can help pinpoint strategic locations.
Cross-visitations
Thanks to mobility data showing cross-visitations, you can see where your visitors regularly go to identify potential partnerships and collaborations and get an even deeper understanding of who your customers are and their behavior.
Means of transportation
Mobility data can help you detect which means of transportation people in the area use. For example, if many people passing by a store use the subway, it might make sense to invest in billboard ads at the subway station. But if most people are going by car or by bike, other strategic decisions are preferable.
Migration patterns
With mobility data, you can follow behavioral changes caused by emergency situations quickly. You can understand how mobility patterns change during, for example, pandemics and disasters, and how to allocate resources to prevent the spread of infectious diseases after a disaster, or alternate locations of physical adverts and mobile venues like food trucks.
Plus, you can identify emerging areas with population growth due to relocation. Armed with this business intelligence, you can also be one step ahead and predict the impact of future catastrophes on movement patterns.
Dwell time
Dwell time helps you understand how many people visit a POI and how long they stay. The data works to map customer behavior and identify areas of customer journey improvement.
What to consider when using mobility data for business decisions
Mobility data is the future of data, and it's available to you now! Keep in mind, there are some factors to consider when using mobility data for business decisions.
First of all, it involves the application of sophisticated methods for data analysis. Data can be angled to says almost anything. One dataset can come to opposing conclusions depending on the method used for analysis.
Secondly, does the mobility data paint an accurate picture of the population? In developed countries, the bias may be less significant than in developing countries, where mobile phone usage can be skewed because of gender and socioeconomic factors.
Then there’s also the over-estimation bias. Over-estimation bias arises, for example, when looking at the number of commuters without considering that they often are wealthier than the part of the population that is not commuting.
Finally, mobility data can be used together with other types of data, such as census data. It’s all about correct extraction and analysis to harness the business intelligence metrics we're looking for.
Clustering and contextualization to extract intelligence
Clustering and contextualization can be used to identify different types of events, such as seasonal events, dwell events, travel events, and home and work events. Knowing what kind of human behavior takes place at what locations helps make smarter strategic decisions.
Conclusion
Mobility data can lead to smarter decisions for many reasons. First and foremost, it tracks actual movement, as opposed to census data that often relies on surveys. By analyzing mobility data, you can also gain valuable competitor intelligence, as well as an understanding of what kind of activities and events take place at different geographical locations.
Mobility data also provides invaluable insight during natural catastrophes and pandemics. By examining it to map human migration patterns, it can play a vital role in disease prevention.
Regardless of your industry, there are various applications of mobility data for smarter business decisions! You get a competitive edge into the bargain.
