Understanding the human race as a whole is an unfeasible, and largely unnecessary quest.
Businesses are more interested in understanding specific groups of consumers whose shared characteristics mean they have a propensity to use certain products or services – otherwise known as consumer segments.
Know your audience
Consumers are traditionally segmented using demographic data points, such as age, gender, and location. But these factors alone aren’t necessarily the best way to identify and analyse groups of consumers that may be interested in your product or service. After all, two women in their thirties who live in London can have vastly different interests and needs.
Businesses are finding more nuanced ways to categorise consumers and are particularly interested in behaviour as a way to define audience groups. How people act tells businesses far more about them than simple demographic information and in recent Marketing Week research, over 90% of respondents say behaviour is the most effective method of segmentation for marketing campaigns.
Vast spatial data sets – produced by mobile apps as people go about their daily lives – are an incredibly powerful source of behavioural information that can be used for segmentation. Rather than making assumptions about what people are doing and how they are behaving, business can analyse real-world movements and identify particular groups of interest.
Using our state-of-the-art spatial big data platform, GeoSpock enables customers to identify key groups using custom logic and definitions. These are applied to immense volumes of raw movement data, combined with other data sets such as points of interest to layer in context.
Business or pleasure? Mapping a traveller’s pattern
If you are interested in business travellers, for instance, you might run a query that identifies people who visit airports on weekdays, and then return to the airport within a certain timeframe, perhaps two or three days. Equally if you are interested in people that stay in hotels you can run a query to identify consumers located within a certain radius of known hotel locations. You could add a constraint saying you are only interested in people who are at those hotel locations between the hours of 3am and 4am – a proxy for knowing they are staying the night. You could also apply additional logic around the frequency of visits to exclude people that work in hotels overnight.
It gets even more interesting when the results of these queries are combined to explore the characteristics of business travellers who stay in hotels. By merging the two data sets, you can generate a list of IDs for business hotel visitors, which can be pushed into other platforms to activate against. Advertising is one form of activation, where IDs are used to specifically target members of that segment. But IDs can also be fed into a machine-learning platform to build models showing what a business traveller who stays in a hotel looks like.
Utilising spatial data to unlock consumer segmentation and behavioural insight, modern businesses have the key to group consumers based on relevant, shared characteristics.
Contact us
To learn more about how the GeoSpock spatial big data platform can unlock insights in your data or to see a product demo, get in touch and a member of our team will contact you.