Using data to find your ideal customer

How well do you really know your customers?

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“They don’t know that we know that they know we know!” – Phoebe Buffay

What do you know? About your customers that is.

Most likely you have assumptions and these assumptions are often backed by data. Perhaps a survey that was conducted a few years ago, or through your experience with your clients first hand. Regardless of how you have acquired this intel, what you think you know about your customers is what should drive your business. But does it?

Effective Market Analysis to Target Your Ideal Customer

Who is your ideal customer? Your absolutely worst customer? Who would you be lucky to nab this quarter? Who could be your Lighthouse Customer?

These questions swim around every Marketer’s, Sale’s and Product Manager’s brain when building new marketing campaigns or planning new sales initiatives. The reality is, we think we have a good idea but may not have enough data to back it up.

Try googling “Ideal Customer”. A lot of businesses think they know the secret formula, but it should be you who determines who is ideal for your business.

Ask yourself these questions:

  • Who do I want to be partnered with?
  • Will I take any customer? Or do I want to portray a branded image?
  • Do I want to grow my business from the outside-in?
  • Does my database contain updated and accurate information about my customers?

Once you have begun to identify who your target customer should be, let the data tell you otherwise. From our experience at DMTI Spatial™ the data often surprises our clients. Most are unaware their database contains inaccurate and outdated data. Often times CRM’s are not kept up to date when employee attrition or customer churn takes place. Your data is what drives your business, not the other way around.

Using the Right Technology for Customer Insights

Need help cleaning this mess up? Start with the basics. Cleanse your address database. Then, ensure your customer records are up to date. Are you customers current? If not, when did they leave?

Once you’ve done this, enrich the data with as much information as possible. What campaigns went out to these customers? When did we reach out to them last? Start with the basics and build a rich repository of data.

Your data is what makes your business unique. Leverage and exploit this well of information to determine who your actual ideal customer is.

Need help? That is where Location Hub® Analytics comes in.

To learn more about how location analytics can help your business, shoot us an email or give us a call at 1.877.477.3684 .

Predictive Analytics Data

Gone fishin’… in a data lake? Predictive Analytics Launch!

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Our new Predictive Analytics product launches in less than 2 weeks! As we approach this exciting milestone, we anxiously anticipate the loud ‘splash’ when LEADS (the codename for the product) finally hits the market. I use splash somewhat literally and quite purposefully, as we reside in the era of the “data lake.”

What is a Data Lake?

 The buzz term data lake is progressively used to describe “a state in which all data resides in one environment and can be explored and interpreted without imposing a schema”. Martin Willcox of Teradata eloquently describes the data lake as promoting three big ideas:

  1. Captures data in a centralized Hadoop-based repository
  2. Stores data in a raw form
  3. Enables the breakdown of barriers that inhibit analytics

Picture yourself fishing in a small canoe in a vast open body of peaceful water. As you peer over the side of the canoe you can see clearly beneath the surface into a limitless sea. Within the waters you can see hundreds, if not thousands, of fish swimming carefree. Each fish is a different color and each fish carelessly brushes against your line. As each fish passes your fishing rod tremors, but it is not until the right fish decides to take the bait that you begin the experience of fighting for your prize.

New Insights are Coming from DMTI

Welcome to the data lake. Each fish is a new variable or piece of data you may or may not have seen before. This intelligence you have been exposed to will allow you to gain the valuable insight from a sea of information that is seemingly too difficult or disparate to collect yourself.

This is what LEADS will do. Stay Tuned!

Click here to see DMTI’s GIS Mapping software solution.

What's in a Product Name?

What’s in a Product Name?

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“What’s the product name of that software again? You know, the one with the graphs and formulas? The one with the spreadsheets?”

– Said no one, ever.

It is very easy to name the top 3 games you played with as a child: Nintendo, Skip It, Ninja Turtles. It is also quite easy to name the first email provider you went with (Hotmail), the first chat room you visited when online chats were all the rage (Yahoo), and the first messaging site you became a member of (ICQ). But it’s not that easy to name a Product; yet, product names become synonymous with actual verbs: “I will Google it”, “Facebook me later.” Developing a Product Name isn’t Easy!

Why is product naming so difficult? Product names are crucial to brand awareness, and they become memorable based on activity or use. For example, can you remember the name of the software you used to fill out a job application? Probably not. According to Distributed Marketing by choosing a good name of a product a company is positioning itself for greater success.

Product name is without a doubt a difficult task. The wrong name can send the wrong message about the Product and brand; what if the user can’t pronounce it? What if they pronounce it wrong? What if it looks like our competitors? What if it’s offensive? What if it’s bleh?

Help DMTI Develop a Great Name

As DMTI gets ready to send a new Location-Based Analytics Product out to market, we face the challenge of providing it with the name. It’s totally new to the spatial visualization field, is incredibly fast and efficient at profiling, requires very little data awareness and manipulation, and is geared to fit multiple verticals without breaking much of a sweat.

So I ask you: what should we call it? email us with your suggestions. Be sure to check out our current lineup of digital mapping products here.

Location Intelligence for Enterprise

Challenges, Drivers and the Need for Location Intelligence

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Even organizations that understand the value of location intelligence struggle to translate that understanding into meaningful profit-generating activities.

Much of the difficulty stems from the challenges of marrying enterprise data, which is typically housed in relational databases, to fully spatial-enabled information. New solutions that provide access to a platform of technology and crucial data building blocks that are integrated into an enterprise’s information processing cycle are available.

The result is a clean, current and consolidated view of enterprise information revealing new opportunities to enhance profitability.

3 drivers of location intelligence in the enterprise market are:

  1. The availability of high quality, current and complete data: Commercial geographic content providers are getting more sophisticated in the data offerings made available (e.g. to the building units in apartment buildings) allowing for a hyper-local perspective in business applications not previously available. Full service providers of location intelligence include subscriptions to geographic data that is maintained and developed on an on-going basis.
  2. Growing awareness of location-enabled services: Location intelligence has been popularized by business to consumer (B2C) applications from Internet search portals and personal navigation device (PND) vendors; and this increased awareness is moving into the Enterprise segment of the market.
  3. The rise of web services as a better-faster-cheaper deployment model: Software as a Service (SaaS) is now recognized as an agent that transforms how companies do business and is one of the most compelling innovations allowing for deployments of location intelligence that are cost effective. Solutions and delivery models are maturing and can be adopted without any disruption to existing IT structures or data modeling applications, reducing the attendant risk and expense.

More and more, the value of location intelligence is being linked to strategic and operational success at an enterprise level. As a means of generating revenues and controlling expenditures, location intelligence can directly impact profitability. Click here to learn more about how DMTI can help you leverage location intelligence.

Marketing Relies on Location

Strong Marketing Relies on Location. Here’s Why.

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Accurate location information may not be the most exciting topic for your next dinner party, but under the hood most businesses depend on it to fuel their business processes, and to help them reach the right audience to drive marketing results. The ability to access accurate location information is impacting many of our customers because strong marketing relies on location. Let’s explore why.

Inaccurate Location Data Impacts Business Growth

Inaccurate location data can be a major inhibitor to growth in your business.  Marketing relies on location, and with more than 85% of customer data tied to a location component, it’s important that your company operate on valid and accurate data.

Customer and prospect data isn’t static – customers move, postal codes change and rural areas become urbanized.  As these changes occur, customer location information quickly becomes outdated. In fact, research by Sirius Decisions shows that 30% of B2B data is out of date within 12 months.  To put this into perspective, if your company has a database of 100,000 records and neglects to implement address quality measures, over 50% of your customer records would be entirely outdated in just over 3 years!

The Impact of Outdated Data on Marketing

Outdated data has an impact on sales and marketing. It’s estimated that 30% of marketing campaigns never make it to the intended recipient. That’s wasted marketing dollars, time and efforts – but most of all lost sales opportunities!

According to a study by the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), every dollar spent on direct marketing advertising, on average, results in $12.61 in direct marketing-driven sales.  Calculate how many marketing dollars you can save by focusing on data quality. Maintaining high data quality can help you drive better results and get you to your revenue targets that much faster.

We see that marketing relies on location, and location data acts as one of the information backbones for all your company operations.  Having accurate location information allows you to move beyond simple addresses – it allows you to integrate cloud based solutions to integrate demographics, firmographics, proximity, drive time, drive distances and many other variables into your decision making process.  This additional data can help you gain invaluable insights about your customers, and identify new markets.

Accurate location information solutions will allow your company to:

  • Visualize your market penetration to help you plan your new campaigns
  • Prequalify and identify new entry markets to increase marketing reach
  • Increase direct mail delivery by up to 30%
  • Reduce customer churn and increase customer satisfaction
  • Boost your campaign metrics
  • and learn more about YOUR customers!

Click here to see a free demo of DMTI’s Location Hub for marketing! 

Developing Location Intelligence

Transforming Location Intelligence into Profit

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Over the next few weeks, this blog series will provide an overview of some of the basic uses of location intelligence (LI) at an enterprise level, its capacity to optimize business processes, and its hierarchy of benefits that impact positively on profitability and competitiveness.

Here’s what readers can expect to learn:

Location Intelligence: Definition and Context

Some progressive organizations are starting to recognize the value of location as an organizing principle. They see how it is embedded in corporate information, and can be applied to current business problems. Through the use of location intelligence technology, these organizations are finding ways to leverage a latent asset.

As a result, telecommunications companies are improving the serviceability of products across their customer base to increase profitability, insurance companies are better understanding risk and pricing to contain costs, utilities are more accurately meeting compliance requirements, and civil authorities are improving threat detection and emergency management capabilities. These are just some of the applications at an enterprise level.

The strategic use of location intelligence is being propelled by several key business drivers, including the need to increase revenue while simultaneously contain or reduce costs. These strategic imperatives form two sides of the profitability equation, which location intelligence is well-suited to solve.

Location intelligence describes the capacity of an entity or organization to use the principles of location to organize, reason, plan and problem solve. It is not defined by the mere presence of location-enabled technology, but moreover by the degree information is enriched by the perspective of location and the successful integration of this information into a process of decision making.

Specifically, location intelligence is the capability to organize and understand complex phenomena through the use of geographic relationships inherent in all information. Applied in a business context, the outcomes are meaningful, actionable and can provide a sustainable competitive advantage. Building location intelligence successfully requires business specific domain knowledge, formal frameworks, and a relentless focus on desired business outcomes. It’s about transforming business processes and creating opportunities.

Dimensions of Location Intelligence

Location intelligence applications are generally industry specific. However, within that framework, uses can be sub-sorted into three sub-categories:

Enterprise decision support: enterprise applications, often vertically focused, that illuminate optimal business strategy. For example, a telecom company consolidating newly acquired customers can identify common customers and determine how to offer services to achieve the greatest value. An insurance company can link geography dependent risk elements such as proximity to a flood zone or density of coverage in specific neighborhoods to better contain costs, and mitigate or more accurately price for risk.

Customer service: applications that facilitate customer service and self-service to improve the overall customer experience.For example, a government agency can more efficiently measure service levels or plan for the distribution of services that are in many cases dependent on variables that change over space, such as household income or number of children. Governments may also be able to better protect constituents by applying location intelligence to existing workflows so as to enhance fraud detection or threat detection capabilities.

Consumer applications: enterprise applications that build loyalty among customers and influence purchasing behaviors. For example, retailers can execute store-specific promotions with more accuracy, and profile and target their markets, resulting in the identification of higher value customers. Or retailers may use location intelligence to augment loyalty program services via internet channels, as in neighbourhood smart store offerings.

Table 1.0 – Use scenarios for location intelligence by industry

Uses of Location Intelligence
Communications & Media Insurance and Finance Government Services
Marketing

  • micro-marketing
  • assessing penetration levels
  • identifying competitive threats
 Portfolio Analysis

  • predictive analytics
  • pricing and loss reserving
  • assessing policy saturation
 Address Management

  • address validation
  • data cleansing
  • data maintenance
Customer Service

  • pre-sales qualification
  • dispatch efficiencies
  • multi-product eligibility
 Marketing Services

  • property-level campaigns
  • neighbourhood context
  • repeat marketing tracking
 Information Integration

  • improved data integrity
  • a “one client view”
  • reducing cascading error
Operations

  • customer serviceability
  • cost avoidance
  • network planning
 Sustainable Compliance

  • risk assessment
  • improved monitoring
  • compliance auditing & reporting
 Entity Authentication

  • fraud detection
  • risk profiling and scoring
  • advanced analytics

Up Next: Challenges, Drivers and the Need for Location Intelligence 

Understanding location-based marketing

The Continued Rise of Location-Based Marketing

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Location-based marketing is helping a whole new generation of marketers understand how using data helps them better find, target and message to their best prospects and customers.

A report from Juniper Research estimates that revenues from the Mobile Context and Location Services market will reach $43.3B by 2019 almost 4x the current market valuation at this point.

But how should marketers leverage location to better understand and reach their customer base?

How to Leverage Location to Understand Customers

The first thing to take into consideration is the accuracy of your location data, or the location data of your ad provider. Paying for ads that are presented to someone who is nowhere near your location defeats the entire purpose of location-based messaging.

According to a study published by ThinkLinear in July of this year:

“The problem is that, on average, only 34% of ad requests that include latitude and longitude data are accurate within 100 meters of a user’s location. That means advertisers are paying to target a user in a specific location, but the person isn’t really there. Advertisers aren’t getting what they paid for, performance suffers, and the whole industry ends up looking bad.”

In these types of instances, providers like DMTI Spatial are able to bring their GIS knowledge to the table to help – transforming traditional address data into geocoded roof-top accurate locations to ensure that advertisers have a much more accurate data set to work with.

How Different Demographics Use Location-Based Services

The second element to consider is how people access and leverage location based services.  For example, a recent survey posed by the Location Based Marketing Association (LBMA) titled “The Internet of Things: The Future” found that:

Women are slightly more likely than men (54 percent vs. 47 percent) to share data from their connected car in exchange for location-based coupons or discounts.

Men are more likely than women (33 percent vs. 22 percent) to share data from their connected car if informed of potentially interesting locations along their route.

These behavior patterns mirror what we as marketers might expect from the non-location marketing based world, but are worth taking into consideration when considering the use of location-based marketing to reach out to your customers.  Who are you looking to target, and what information do they want to receive from you on their mobile device.

The combination of behaviour and location are quickly pulling marketers, particularly in the retail space, to focus on location-based offers.  The launch of the Apple iBeacon and Google Glass last year are heralding a new era of communications as customer visit retail locations.  Large brands, including the Bay, Lord & Taylor and others are leveraging the new iBeacon technology, along with location intelligence to message to potential customers.  And it appears that the public is interested too – 77% of us are OK with sharing our location information while we shop, and 81% of those receiving mobile messaging read those messages.

Does your organization have precise location data for your customers?  How will your organization take on the brave new world of location-based marketing? Click here to learn more about how DMTI helps marketers leverage location data to increase the ROI of marketing campaigns.

Customer Insights and Location Data

Unlock Customer Insights with Location Intelligence

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In today’s crowded marketplace, there is immense pressure on marketers to deliver customer insights that lead to new opportunities. These insights increase revenues and differentiate their product offering through successful campaign initiatives. One powerful example is the impact bad data can have on marketing efforts. In this use case, we look at current address information.

Impact of Current Address Information on Marketing

140 million addressed mail pieces don’t make it to the intended recipients and 70% of undeliverable mail is attributed to people who have moved. This means marketers must leverage accurate location information to their competitive advantage.

Successful customer insights begin with accurate and current address information to increase campaign effectiveness. Marketers can expect to see an increase in ROI by approximately 5% and reduce operational costs associated with erroneous data. Location Intelligence empowers marketers with the means to assess the ‘who’ and ‘where’ when maximizing marketing decisions.

Success begins with accurate and current address information to increase campaign effectiveness, increase ROI by approximately 5% and reduce operational costs associated with erroneous data.

View our video on Location Intelligence to see how it empowers marketers with the means to assess the ‘who’ and ‘where’ when maximizing marketing decisions.

Click here to see how DMTI’s market analysis tools help marketers