Location intelligence has impacted the retail industry more than most. The rapid increase in adoption of mobile devices has provided a treasure trove of new location-based data about how consumers behave, both online and off.
Location-based data gives us a rich and nuanced view of populations, including where they live, work, and play. Traffic patterns reveal where consumers go, when they go there, and how long they stay.
As a raw collection of data points, that’s a lot of information to process. But once it’s refined, organized, and normalized, it provides valuable insights that can drive higher profitability for retailers.
What is location intelligence?
Location intelligence is the process of deriving meaningful insights from geospatial data relationships to solve real-world challenges. It uses enrichment data to power analysis and deliver accurate contextual information about the locations and the movement of people in the world around them.
It begins with maps, buildings, roads, and traffic patterns. It incorporates geological and meteorological information like temperature, precipitation, and historical information about wildfires, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. In the context of the retail industry, it includes firmographic information about nearby businesses, including competitors.
Location intelligence also tells you who lives in a particular area, how much money they make, and in what types of homes they live. It enriches that data with demographic details to provide a wealth of information about populations.
Location intelligence enriches first-party data with context, such as boundaries. That includes natural boundaries like rivers and streams, jurisdictional boundaries that define cities and towns, and even the social/lifestyle boundaries that define neighborhoods.
Finally, location intelligence helps you to better understand individual and group behavior by combining demographic and psychographic information with detailed data about location and movement.
That’s where solutions like Precisely Data Link for Dun & Bradstreet come in. By connecting Dun & Bradstreet’s trusted business data with Precisely’s data enrichment portfolio, retailers can:
- Evaluate markets more effectively
- Align sales territories with real customer locations
- Sharpen marketing strategies, supply chain management, and competitive analysis
In short, you can plan, market, and grow with confidence.
For retailers, location intelligence provides an opportunity to better understand customers and prospects. In the context of omnichannel retail, it provides a critical linkage between a consumer that visits your company website, and the same person when they visit your brick-and-mortar store.
Read our report
Data Driven Retail: Extracting Value From Customer Data
To learn more about how Precisely can help you, download our free report
Let’s look at five of the top use cases for applying location intelligence in the retail industry.
5 Top Use Cases for Location Intelligence in Retail
So, how does this all come to life for retailers? Here are five powerful ways you can put location intelligence to work.
1. Retail site selection
Retail site selection has come a long way in the past decade, largely due to advances in location intelligence. Years ago, a detailed traffic analysis might have involved physically surveilling a potential location for hours or days at a time and counting the number of cars in the parking lot or the number of shopping carts coming out of a store.
With advanced location intelligence, retailers can work with dynamic map visualizations that reveal populations and demographic groupings.
A high-end clothing retailer, for example, can explore potential new locations in the context of surrounding areas and traffic patterns. By visualizing the catchment area for a potential location, it’s easier to quickly zero in on high-quality sites.
By overlaying competitor locations on top of that, the retailer can get even better understanding of potential profitability for a proposed site.
Finally, a retailer can zoom in on a particular neighborhood to better understand the granular traffic patterns within that neighborhood. If a complementary business at one end of a main thoroughfare is attracting the same target demographic, but without being a direct competitor, it’s likely a better choice than a similar location at the other end of the street.
With Data Link for Dun & Bradstreet, you can go even further – evaluating market gaps, understanding competitive density, and identifying complementary businesses. That added context helps you choose the highest-potential sites and make smarter investments.
2. Better merchandising
Retailers can also use location intelligence to better serve customers in a particular catchment area.
By analyzing demographic data in the area, for example, a grocery retailer might learn that there is a high population of East Asian immigrants in a nearby community. This could present an opportunity to better serve that audience by adding specialty food items to the product mix, or by advertising in publications or media outlets that cater to the same audience.
3. Targeted advertising
Location-based marketing is another opportunity for retailers to drive increased revenue, by delivering targeted messages to selected consumers when they are nearby.
A pet supply store, for example, might present a discount offer to a dog owner who has just stopped by the big-box store next door. Typically that would be presented as a push notification to the consumer’s mobile phone, delivered through a third-party app installed by the user.
Targeted advertising can also be pushed to digital advertising platforms based on the presence of a broader audience in the same place at the same time. If a number of sports fans are driving past a particular billboard on game day, for example, location intelligence could push a digital display ad for a local sports-themed restaurant chain.
By linking demographic and location data with Dun & Bradstreet’s business insights and marketing data solutions, retailers can elevate their targeting. You can improve segmentation, reach the right audiences, and deliver campaigns that resonate – not just by ZIP code, but by actual business presence and customer demand.
4. Customer experience
Location intelligence also presents retailers with an opportunity to link their customer’s online experience with brick-and-mortar stores. By connecting website visits and browsing history to a person’s physical presence in the store, you can better understand buyer behavior and address their needs.
Location intelligence also helps connect fragmented identities – like phone numbers, emails, or physical addresses – to the transactional data and digital marketing activities associated with that customer. With Dun & Bradstreet’s data linked in, you get an even clearer view of your customers which allows you to create personalized experiences both online and in-store.
5. Performance management
Finally, retailers can use location intelligence to establish better performance benchmarks for individual locations.
In many organizations, annual targets for stores are driven by a percentage increase over the prior year’s performance. This tends to challenge high performers, who must constantly strive to exceed last year’s store performance. At the same time, it perpetuates poor outcomes from low-performing stores.
There are several other models for defining performance objectives, each of which has its own advantages and disadvantages. If goals are allocated based on market opportunity, for example, then stores in highly competitive locations may find it difficult to meet their targets, whereas those with little competition will not be challenged.
With location intelligence, retailers can gain a much richer view of each location’s true profit potential. Retail data analysis gives you the opportunity to understand each location in the context of demographics, traffic, competition, store size and features, and more. With location intelligence, store objectives can be defined based on an intelligent analysis of actual profit potential.
When you add in Data Link for Dun & Bradstreet, that analysis becomes even sharper. Combining retail and demographic insights with trusted business data helps you benchmark accurately and identify untapped growth opportunities.
Unlock Smarter Retail Growth with Connected Data
To maximize store performance and campaign effectiveness, leverage Precisely Data Link for Dun & Bradstreet. You’ll quickly gain the insights you need to plan, market, and grow with confidence.
To learn more read the report: Data Driven Retail: Extracting Value From Customer Data
