Combine location data and external trends to build diverse audience strategies [Video]

Published on: 4th June 2020

As markets reemerge from the coronavirus pandemic, location data can help businesses identify shopping behavior changes and formulate marketing strategies for returning and new customers. Those strategies are more effective when they’re layered with economic and psychographic information to build diverse target audiences, said PlaceIQ’s Duncan McCall and Foursquare’s David Shim, during our local intelligence session of Live with Search Engine Land.

“What we’re seeing is, as part of the reset, past behaviors aren’t going to be as actionable because people have not gone into store locations,” Shim said, emphasizing that understanding which audience segments are currently making in-store visits is essential due to the lack of relevant data during the lockdown period. “You have to almost consider [that] these are all new customers for the next few weeks, for the next month,” he said.

With the unemployment rate now being the highest since the Great Depression, consumers have reacted to the economic uncertainty by tightening their budgets and saving more, making audience segments built before the pandemic less reliable. “I think you’ve got to layer all that psychographic and behavioral information, as well as macroeconomic information, on top of the location information to really tell the full story,” McCall said.

Why we care. Factoring external trends into the audience segmentation process can help businesses to get more precise with their messaging and ad targeting. It can also save them from spending resources that might be wasted marketing to customers that aren’t ready to make purchases anytime soon.

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