5 Tools for Location-Based Audience Profiling

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Local Business - Marketing Concept for Small Business

Location-based audience profiling is having a real world impact on the way large brands spend their campaign dollars. Given that 93% of consumer spending still happens offline, there’s not always a one-to-one relationship between online ad exposure and e-commerce sales.

With location-based audience profiling, marketers have the opportunity to connect online metrics to in-store sales. This allows for smarter media planning and results in a higher ROI on digital campaigns.

Location-based audience profiling also gives marketers the opportunity to learn more about the behaviors, movements, and preferences of mobile users in their target demographics. For example, whether Golf Channel viewers prefer shopping at Macy’s vs. Nordstrom, or eating at Panera vs. Chipotle, could influence where retailers like Golfsmith and Dick’s Sporting Goods choose to spend their mobile ad dollars.

Here are five location-based tools that brands can use for location-based audience profiling.

1. PlaceIQ: Leverage TV viewership data to understand mobile trends.
For the past year, PlaceIQ has been working with Rentrak, the media measurement and research firm, to map TV viewing data against consumer locations and generate audience profiles. PlaceIQ gathers insights from consumers’ smartphones and helps global brands understand the relationships between TV preferences and location behaviors. (For example, whether Scandal viewers eat more often at Burger King or McDonalds.) The insights that brands gather can then be used to make more strategic investments in mobile marketing.

2. Urban Airship: Use location histories to build detailed mobile user profiles.
Urban Airship offers audience profiling tools that allow marketers to incorporate location-based targeting into their mobile relationship management strategies. The company combines in-app behaviors, user preferences, location, and devices to help marketers build audience profiles. With location specifically, brands can segment mobile users based on where they’re at currently or where they’ve been in the past. In addition to learning about consumer behaviors and preferences, brands can use these insights to send mobile push notifications and rich content at key moments when consumers are most likely to convert.

3. Facebook: Measure the performance of Facebook ads.
Facebook’s Conversion Lift acts as a link between digital marketing and in-store sales for marketers who use the social network’s ad platform. In order to track the impact that Facebook ads are having on offline sales, Facebook establishes test groups and control groups when new Facebook campaigns are established. Advertisers share conversion data from their campaigns with Facebook, and the network compares conversions to its test and control groups to measure the lift generated by its campaigns. Advertisers can access their results in real-time through Facebook’s Ad Manager.

4. Placed: Connect digital ad exposures to store visit lift.
Placed takes a unique approach to audience profiling and attribution, using panels of opted-in mobile users to learn about audience movements and trends, rather than relying on surveys or geo-fencing. Placed Attribution takes advantage of the 200 million locations that Placed Insights measures each day, assigning attributes to geographic areas through location in order to target mobile ads. The vendor helps marketers to quantify the impact that mobile ads are having on in-store visits. Marketers can track the number of store visits, store conversion rates, and cost per store visit. They can also measure the characteristics of mobile audiences.

5. Placemeter: Extract audience data from live video streams.
Placemeter uses thousands of personal and private video cameras, coming from traffic cameras and security footage, along with user reporting through a mobile application, for dynamic data layering. The company applies image recognition software and extracts measurable data from live streams to optimize the way people interact with physical locations. Brands can use the information collected by Placemeter to better understand the cities and neighborhoods where their stores are located and to determine where new venues should be placed based on current traffic trends.

Know of other tools that marketers can use for location-based audience profiling? Leave a description in the comments.

Stephanie Miles is a senior editor at Street Fight.

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Stephanie Miles is a journalist who covers personal finance, technology, and real estate. As Street Fight’s senior editor, she is particularly interested in how local merchants and national brands are utilizing hyperlocal technology to reach consumers. She has written for FHM, the Daily News, Working World, Gawker, Cityfile, and Recessionwire.