Are you using location data in your competitive intelligence toolkit? Competitive intelligence refers to the gathering and analyzing of competitor data to drive business decisions. Competitive intelligence tools can include a competitor’s website traffic, product information, customer behavior, and more. Insight into these areas can have a truly transformative effect on your business. A deep understanding of your competition’s position in the market, customers, and strategy can present new opportunities for your business. For example, competitive intelligence can help identify new revenue opportunities, create detailed customer profiles, and develop targeted advertising campaigns with measurable results.
The Role of Location Intelligence
Derived from pseudonymous mobile location data, location intelligence offers insight into consumers and the commercial places of interest they visit. This can be a valuable tool for businesses as it offers key insights into competitors and their customer base, providing businesses with a competitive edge. Using location data, a business can gain a deeper understanding of their market, enabling them to make informed decisions for growth.
Location data that is overlaid with event data provides an additional layer of information. For example, knowing that people were in a public park gives you limited information about their purpose. Now, verifying that they were in the park to attend a classical music concert provides additional context, rounding out the customer profile. Location data can help blend online and offline consumer behaviors together, making it one of the most effective competitive intelligence tools.
3 Ways to Use Location Data for Competitive Intelligence
There are many ways to benefit from location data, especially for competitive intelligence. The top three ways to do this are:
1. Analyze Competitor Locations
Do you know how many people are visiting your competitors’ locations? What about where they go before and after? Location data can help answer these questions. Location intelligence companies will tap into consumer activity at competitor locations, focusing on foot traffic by unique and repeat visitors. This gives you foot traffic data that shows the amount and type of consumers in your competition’s market.
With location intelligence, a business can gain insight into consumer patterns and habits by observing what other locations consumers visit along with competitor locations. For example, if you see that consumers are consistently traveling out of their way to visit a competitor’s location, it may indicate a gap in the market for potential growth. This information can inform business decisions, such as expanding into new neighborhoods based on evidence of customer demand.
2. Conquesting Campaigns
Customer loyalty is ever-evolving. In fact, the pandemic shook many brands and forced a shift in brand loyalty, demonstrating how turbulent a customer’s loyalty can be. Understanding the reason for your competitors’ customer loyalty and the level of loyalty they show can be groundbreaking for your business.
Location intelligence makes it possible to directly target the customers of a competitor and reach them in the right place, at the right time, with a message that will drive results. That information can allow you to deliver ads directly to your competitors’ customers to increase market share.
Location intelligence can also help improve other, less direct methods of targeting competitors’ customers. For example, knowing that the majority of the competition’s customers frequent a dog park may lead to a cross-promotional opportunity, such as sponsoring a community event. In both situations, location intelligence provides the insight needed to target the competition’s customers and convert them to your own.
3. Lookalike Audiences
Creating lookalike audiences combines several of the ideas discussed above, including creating profiles of your competitors’ customers. Because location data provides information on where customers like to go, it can help you identify customer characteristics such as:
- Interests – the hobbies, likes, dislikes, etc. of your competitors’ customers
- Brand affiliations – your competitors’ customers’ loyalty to certain brands
- Visit patterns and distance traveled – when customers visit a competitor’s location and how far they travel to visit
With this information, you can develop a well-rounded picture of your competition’s customer base. This is how you generate lookalike audiences—similar consumers that are likely to be interested in your own products and services. Campaigns can target those individuals, creating a focused, data-driven method of expanding your customer base with likely candidates.
Strengthen Your Competitive Edge with Location Intelligence
Location intelligence is a highly valuable tool for businesses looking to gain a competitive edge. Although obtaining, processing, and validating location data may seem daunting, providers resolve these concerns. Location intelligence providers can offer businesses access to high-quality, personalized data that can be tailored to meet various business goals.
Whether you are looking for insights on competitor locations, planning conquesting campaigns, or identifying lookalike audiences, location intelligence can be a valuable asset to any business looking to grow and stay ahead of the competition. Book a meeting with us today to learn more.
