Location data can be a goldmine for marketers. Accurate, real-time location data can enable marketers to deliver more efficient targeted campaigns on mobile devices, giving brands the power to deliver a hyper-relevant message to the right people at the right time.

But it’s not just real-time location data that has value. Marketers can leverage historical location data to create audience segments which can help to optimize their mobile marketing efforts.

Historical location data opens up three key opportunities:

  • Real-world re-targeting. Marketers can target users who visited their brand before. These people have already expressed awareness and interest, so historical location data can help target those users to drive repeat visits, retention, and ultimately, loyalty. Someone who visited, say, a smoothie chain a few times before, may be more likely to visit again.
  • Competitive set targeting. Historical location data can be used for “conquesting” users who have visited competitors’ locations. If a user has visited a rival smoothie chain, one can infer that this user likes smoothies, which then presents an opportunity to attract this person to your particular brand and product.
  • Behavioral targeting. Historical location data can be used to build behavioral segments—such as affluent parents, fashionistas, auto intenders, etc. — from a combination of data, including app usage and location behavior. Historical location data enables marketers to identify patterns that, in turn, empower more targeted, effective marketing.

 

Verifying history

Historical location data is valuable, but only if it’s accurate. Just as the accuracy of location data impacts the efficacy of a geo-targeted campaign, it also affects audience segmentation. User’s geo-behavioral patterns can be analyzed to infer attributes and characteristics related to location. If the location data used is inaccurate, the targeted message won’t hit its mark. Audience segments based on faulty data provide no meaningful value to advertisers. Accurate geodata is key to developing audience segments that will drive results and prevent ad spend from being squandered. Given that 59 percent of location data coming from exchanges is inaccurate, this should be on a marketer’s radar.

How can you make sure your location data is accurate? By using an independent, third-party verification tool like Placecast’s Location Verification that leverages data that is both accurate and has scale. Carriers are emerging with an unrivaled truth set for verifying the accuracy of mobile movement and usage data. The same carrier networks that we rely on to ensure that our mobile devices work all the time, provide a system of record that can be used to help marketers understand what data works for their campaigns. Carriers are truly agnostic players and have the data to verify other data sets without ever exposing individual consumer information.

Location Verification can work for you whether you build or buy your audience segments. In the situation where you use a few location data sources (first- or third-party), you can and should use Location Verification to filter data, so only accurate data is used to build your segments.

When you buy segments, it’s essential to partner with a vendor to ensure accurate location data is being used to develop your target audience segments. You can use Location Verification three ways to make sure you get the most with a partner.

The first way is as a bake-off tool to choose between vendors. Of course, media buyers engaged in the procurement process want to pick the vendor that can deliver the best results – the more accurate the data, the better the results. Another use case would be to optimize your spend with an existing vendor or vendors and help deepen fruitful relationships. Lastly, Location Verification can verify every new segment that comes in, which is crucial to relationship and data efficiency. You want to make sure that the data you buy stays valuable over the long term.

And because Placecast works with several vendors already, Location Verification can integrate seamlessly into your brand’s strategy. This means you can start powering highly-targeted campaigns to location-verified audience segments with little extra work on your part.

Location data allows marketers to define and track audience behaviors, making its accuracy critical to efficient marketing campaigns. With Location Verification, marketers are empowered to target the best audience for their message — guaranteed.

Are your mobile campaigns optimized to their full potential? To find out, check out: Emodo Verification