Data-driven business intelligence is a secret competitive factor for most businesses. A classic example of it is when Dell Computer founder Michael Dell sold newspaper subscriptions in high school. Most of his colleagues simply marketed to every home in their territory, but Dell mined data for who moved and or had just married – and soon drove off to college in a new BMW.
You too have access to a goldmine of business intelligence, and you are sitting on it as we speak: your contact data. These addresses are the key to a wealth of location-based data, ranging from income and housing values to census tract and block values. In this blog, we are going to look at how you can leverage this contact data for intelligent geo-targeted marketing, with a little help from Service Objects.
The case for location intelligence
Location intelligence (LI) has become ubiquitous across businesses of all sizes nowadays, particularly medium-to-large organizations. In particular, enhancing your marketing with location and demographic data has a number of immediate, out-of-the-box advantages:
- ROI. First and foremost, laser-targeting your market based on geographic and demographic criteria reduces your cost per sale. It gives you the opportunity to customize your product offerings, services and marketing message based on a wide range of criteria, and increase the response rate and reduce the level of spend for your marketing campaigns.
- Happier customers. Marketing Evolution notes that “When used properly, location-based marketing allows marketers to hone in on specific customer segments with targeted offers, while improving customer experience for a population that increasingly values instant gratification.” Prospects are more likely to respond to targeted marketing and become your customer, and fewer disinterested parties are targeted compared with traditional scattershot marketing approaches.
- Greater market visibility. We mean this point literally as well as figuratively. Capturing and mining location data gives you the ability to use tools such as geographic information systems (GIS) to visually examine target markets and trends within your customers and prospects.
- Your competitors are doing it. According to Carto’s 2018 State of Location Intelligence report, 94% of C-level executives surveyed at businesses over 500 employees noted that they collected and stored location information about their customers, and their broader survey of executives concluded that location intelligence is critical to the success of medium-to-large sized companies.
This same survey also uncovered an important point about the current LI landscape: barely a quarter of businesses use any kind of custom geography below the ZIP code level, while only 17% make use of Census-level block groups for US addresses. This provides a real competitive advantage for businesses that use location-enhanced address processing products such as Service Objects’ DOTS Address Insight, which provides extensive demographic and Census-level information as well as rooftop-level geocoordinates and address validation.
This underscores another important point about location intelligence for marketing: it uses data that is easily obtained from your existing contact data, with the right tools. This data can also have important applications outside of marketing, such as measuring compliance with legislation such as fair lending and loan processing regulations.
Marketing applications for location intelligence
Some of the ways that companies employ LI in their marketing operations include:
Targeted marketing, where information such as income, geographic location, household characteristics, census or other demographic information are used to refine audiences for specific targeted marketing campaigns;
Growth and expansion planning, where location-enhanced data is used as a critical part of planning for growth, such as siting of new bricks-and-mortal business locations or planning for new products, services and markets.
Competitive analysis, where location intelligence helps inform your competitive position versus other products and services.
Moreover, location intelligence turns a resource that practically every business has – namely, their contact data assets – into a wellspring of business information to inform future strategic decisions within your business and marketing operations.
About Address Insight
Address Insight from Service Objects is a complete, bundled product that offers the best of address validation, geolocation, and associated demographic data in one convenient package. It provides precise rooftop level longitude and latitude coordinates, critical postal deliverability information, and over 140 demographic data points including 13 incorporated and unincorporated flags.
This product can help make your marketing efforts more focused, through messaging that is culturally relevant, and delivered timely and accurately. It provides geotargeting data to deliver precise marketing messages to targeted prospects based on longitude and latitude, demographics that help target your prospects based on socio-economic, cultural and population data points, and industry-leading address validation to ensure that your direct mail marketing reaches your audience.
For a deeper dive into the kinds of information you can obtain using Address Insight, its extensive Developer Guide is available for free on our website, with no registration required. Click here to view this Guide online, with no registration required.
Team up with us
When you work with Service Objects, you are partnering with a stable industry leader in the contact data validation field. Some of the many benefits of working with us include convenient API interfaces that integrate directly with popular CRM and business automation platforms, financially guaranteed 99.999% uptime, and bank-grade security with multiple redundant servers nationwide.
And of course, every Service Objects customer enjoys the benefits of our friendly product experts, including knowledgeable implementation assistance as well as available 24/7/365 technical support. We are happy to discuss your own specific location intelligence needs, or arrange a free product demo for Address Insight or any of our extensive contact data quality products – contact us anytime.
