Why your business needs location graphs more than you realise

This post is sponsored by Lifesight.

One of the most pressing insight challenges for today’s businesses is about finding connections and stories in humongous amounts of data for optimal decision-making. With mobile alone, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is created every day. In fact, 90% of the data in the world right now has been created in the past two years.

Add human mobility to this equation. Millions of consumers are engaging with brands and ads on the go. They are travelling, shopping, making purchase decisions, living and working – all while constantly connected to devices. Marketers have an unprecedented opportunity to consider all of this unstructured location data into crucial marketing decisions.

What they need is to find a way to connect the dots and find the stories that location data is capable of telling them. And that is why we have location graphs.

So, what exactly is a location graph?

A location graph is a data set of how people move in the physical world, and more importantly, how they engage with people, places and objects in this physical world. Where we go defines who we are. And location graphs help uncover these offline attributes and behaviours in the physical world. These insights not only reveal complete consumer personas, but also what values consumers hold close, the lifestyles they want to lead, and where and how they are likely to spend money. In the process, location graphs make marketing more customer-centric than ever before.

Location graphs are especially useful for marketers in organisations that have a ready repository of customer data. Traditionally, customer data in enterprises such as telcos and BFSI includes generic information such as demographics, data and voice usage, transaction history, etc. Boosting this customer data with location graphs will result in accurate segmentation and the prediction of needs and behaviours.

Location graphs driving next-gen contextual marketing

We are at an interesting time in history when consumers are used to everything contextual and deeply personalised. From their cab rides to their social media feeds, news apps to grocery apps, everything they use is designed specifically for their individual needs and preferences.

Location graphs not only reveal complete consumer personas, but also what values consumers hold close, the lifestyles they want to lead and where and how they are likely to spend money.

In times like these, if marketing messages are designed on the basis of deep and well-rounded insights from location graphs, they resonate much more. That is because these insights make marketing messages far more contextual and personalised.

Consumers around the world are now demanding exactly this from brand marketers. According to Accenture’s 2018 Personalisation Pulse Check report, a staggering 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that recognise, remember and provide them with deeply contextual and personalised offers and recommendations.

Clearly, location graphs that enable such deep contextualisation and personalisation are the new holy grail of marketing 6.0.

Why are marketers still struggling with location graphs then?

Because, despite the proven and urgent need for location graphs in marketing, not enough partners are creating them exclusively for marketers. On their own, marketers face several complexities in incorporating location graphs in everyday business decisions or finding meaningful stories in this graph data.

At the same time, processing unstructured location data is not a routine task for them. This is why for generations now, marketers have struggled to get access to location graphs in a manner that is easy to use with their existing customer databases.

Lifesight’s Placesense Graph is a ready data solution that caters to the unique needs of marketers. It is pre-processed graph data that is compatible with practically any DMP in order to enrich existing customer data with offline consumer behaviour data.

Here’s how it works:

Location graphs will set the pace for the future of marketing

Mobile Marketer predicts the commoditisation and democratisation of location data sets as the market generates more and more use cases for location intelligence across industry sectors. This process has already started with platforms such as Lifesight’s Placesense Graph.

By 2020, we foresee location graphs deeply impacting the entire spectrum of the customer experience and marketing, from ads and engagement to aftersales. This will become possible only when location graphs become an inherent part of existing customer databases and CRM. Marketers who ride this wave early on will gain an edge over the competition.

About Lifesight

Lifesight is a location intelligence platform, headquartered in Singapore, that helps marketers understand and measure offline consumer behaviour so they can make better business decisions and optimise ad spend. We harness the power of location data to bolster the complete marketing life cycle of businesses in Asia, including insights, ad targeting, and marketing attribution. We also offer our signature location data solution – Placesense – to DSPs, publishers, e-commerce, telecom, banks and other large corporations.

The writer is CEO and co-founder of Lifesight, Tobin Thomas.