The original version of this blog post and podcast appeared on LSA Insider.
For years “local” was synonymous with small business, but smartphones, ubiquitous sensors and location data have transformed the market. Location has become about context, data and understanding how people interact with businesses and organizations offline. It’s also about audience segmentation, intent and in-store attribution.
In a recent podcast discussion, Greg Sterling, Vice President of strategy and insights at the Local Search Association, spoke with Skyhook’s David Bairstow and Nick Knellinger about how location intelligence has evolved and about current and emerging use cases. Skyhook is a location data and intelligence company based in Boston, MA that specializes in location positioning, context and location insights. It was the original provider of location for the iPhone.
Bairstow and Knellinger said that as companies become more sophisticated about collecting, analyzing and deriving insights from the data, marketers will gain a better understanding of consumer interaction with their brands, stores and competitors.
Bairstow also tells an interesting story about how location data helped a dishwasher manufacturer resolve a customer complaint issue. The brand was able to marry location data to customer complaints and determine that one of its products was malfunctioning at higher altitudes. That resulted in a quicker fix and potentially saved the company millions of dollars.
The conversation includes recommendations about how buyers of location data should assess the accuracy and quality of competitive data providers. It ended with discussion of how machine learning and AI will help location data become smarter and more accurate, for greater insights.
You can listen to the entire podcast below, or access all of the On Target Podcast episodes on iTunes or Google Play.
