Marketers and brands can learn a lot from mobility and location data, but it's a subject at times which divides opinion. There are obvious privacy concerns, brands who wish to reach certain audience profiles will question the scale of the opportunity, and then there are the pre-defined segments which are off-the-shelf audience add-ons to media buying.
The truth is there are many pros and cons to working with location data, but it is unquestionably one of the most valuable data sources currently available. I prefer not to head too far into the weeds of audience targeting and ad platforms, and instead take a different approach to location data. We have many examples of how our partner CityData works with data, but the critical point of reference is that they DO NOT allow brands to target devices directly and selling audiences is not what they do. There are plenty who do, and where it makes sense location data is a powerful addition to any media strategy.
However, we are going to focus on the conversation involving Smarter City initiatives. Location data doesn't always play as large a part during research and planning because often it can be an afterthought, post-campaign learning or tied specifically to an ad buy which brings pressure for it to deliver against a target rather than being allowed to roam free and tell its' own story as a research tool.
Allowing location data to be its' own canvas where marketers can play with the data, pull unbiased insights and draw learnings can add a lot of value to early strategy planning. There will be learnings from which customer persona analysis can be conducted, where long-standing assumptions about an audience profile might either prove to be incorrect, or perhaps expanded on, and through unique data trends/device movement brands can learn about how a city or specific location behaves. Understanding users' online behaviour is one area, but visualising city/town movement patterns offers a very different and larger scale insight from which to draw any number of conclusions as unique as each brand is to its' customer.
With 2023 finally bringing the potential demise of the cookie, or rather more likely, simply the arrival of a new way of working with and managing user data, there is pressure on marketers to begin making changes to how they operate. Google has already released their new analytics update, and there are dozens of companies out there promising to help brands navigate the maze of terms, technology and industry opinion regarding how they conduct audience capturing, and then retarget their customers digitally. Many companies have unique ID approaches to support keeping everything ticking over without headache and panic as technology shifts often weekly in the digital world.
However, with new solutions and directions come internal training and budget concerns. For enterprise customers, this potentially means a huge shift and redeployment of resources to support turning the proverbial Titanic in the right or a new direction.
A marketer's job has never been more difficult or more exciting. It's to the exciting part we should turn to, with so much in the technology space to discuss, smart city and location data are an area worth placing back to the top of your thoughts. Many location data tools available to marketers can be off-the-shelf data segments for a media buy or tools with prescriptive data points dictating what a brand should be looking for such as footfall.
If you bring the focus back a little mobility data can offer so much more. Footfall is rightly valuable but is often an obvious result when considering this type of data. On its own, it can be too simplistic, whilst on the face of it appearing useful, it is too easy to stop at this point rather than adding more variables and finding deeper patterns to strengthen the learnings from location data.
Within the context of your own brand customer personas, consider playing with the data and looking at behaviour through identifying device movement in key locations (like retail, transport, domestic neighbourhoods etc), then run a dispersion analysis over time. Layer in variables which show other data points like device movement between many locations helping to paint a picture and identify patterns over time.
If used with patience and with location data you can trust, you can avoid only being concerned by strategies to help with whom you target or if the data you have is inaccurate. Device movement insights will present you with real-time people patterns where predictable trends can be drawn and applied to a marketing strategy.
In short, mobility data shouldn't be feared or ignored, and if you look past bias like "where's the scale for my audience targeting" the much larger opportunity is not as simple as off the shelf and is completely unique to your brand and limited only by the imagination and ambition of the marketer and data analyst.
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