How to know your audience in the real world

Marketers spend a lot of time trying to identify their ideal audience—through demographics, content and social targeting data, and past purchase history. These are useful profiling data, but they’re not going to give you an edge.

All marketers have access to this data—and therefore, if the source is the same, audience targeting and engagement strategy will converge. We have to broaden our thinking about audience data strategy if we are going to increase scale and engagement opportunities.

Let Movement Data Do the Talking

To implement more relevant (and therefore more cost-effective) audience targeting, marketers must understand consumers’ real-world behaviours. They need to observe, measure, record and analyse customer movement behaviour.

Movement data isn’t just any data. It has a far higher audience currency value because it shows intent. And intent is more valuable than traditional demographic signals because it doesn’t force marketers to guess consumer action.

Mobile devices travel with the consumer and generate a lot of contextual data, much of which has been untapped. There is an enormous value in historical geo-location data—where you have been reveals a lot about who you are.

Pointed questions then help hone in on what data to capture: Do you know where your audience lives? Where they work? Do they travel abroad, and how often? What kind of restaurants do they frequent and what food do they like? Where do they spend their weekends? Where do they shop? Through movement data and location technology, the answers to these questions are easy to attain.

"Location has evolved from a tool to target people where they are, to a platform of real-time and historical insights about consumers' true intent and actions," says Regina Goh, managing director Asia, Blis.

"The power of location for targeting in the moment has been proven. We can now show how location has evolved beyond ‘marketing in the moment’, to enable marketers to create specific audience segments based on actual movement behaviours."

Time/Frequency + Movement Behaviour = Audience Intent

Movement data tells us where consumers go, how frequently they visit, and how long they stay. Understanding this behaviour allows marketers to calculate intent more accurately. Movement data also provides an understanding of physical-world behaviours and marketers are leveraging this to drive success in their campaigns: Who visited my store? Who visited my competitor’s store? Who frequents coffee shops as opposed to quick-serve restaurants?

Using only online behaviour as a profiling tool gives you only limited information about your target audience. Combining digital media habits with real world behavioural data in real time or historical, gives us more insights about target audiences. Consumer intent can also be powerfully illustrated when we observe time and frequency of location behaviours.

Successful brands will fit into the user’s day and appear at the right moment in just this way. This represents a new model of relevance and timeliness, one that requires an even greater understanding of the user than ever before. Movement data provides a depth to audience insights that demographic and content data alone cannot deliver.

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