The Potential of Location Data Goes Far Beyond Marketing
Location data is an advertiser’s dream. It allows them to deliver more contextually relevant offers to consumers. The practice has been common since 2010 when brands like Starbucks started targeting advertisements based on potential customers’ proximity to their shops.
The scope, depth and accuracy of location data have since evolved. These advancements open up new use cases for industries beyond marketing and advertising.
Let’s read on to learn how location data can inform strategic business decisions, improve efficiency in our healthcare systems and more.
Location data in retail and real estate planning
From a planning perspective, location data can provide insights into the footfall and geo-behavioral patterns of a potential business or real estate lot. Equipped with this information, financial planners and potential investors can:
- Create more accurate projections, and
- Better understand the potential of the new building’s viability.
Will people want to live here? Will patrons visit these stores? Location data takes out some guesswork when answering these questions.
Retail companies like H&M are already using AI to analyze data from returns, receipts and loyalty cards to meet customer demand and lower costs. Nevertheless, insights drawn from location data can also help to improve the profitability and efficiency of operations.
How so? Through the analysis of foot traffic and customer flow data, retail planners can:
- Identify opportunities in the placement of new outlets or promotional materials.
- Spot weaknesses in underused floor space or overlooked displays.
That’s not all. Predictive footfall data combined with local demographic and geo-behavioral patterns allow retailers to plan the quantities and types of items to stock at any given time.
With location data, retailers can spot weaknesses in underused floor space or overlooked displays
Similarly, commercial real estate developers can make educated decisions on where best to locate their premises by analyzing patterns in spatial data, including:
- Competitor locations
- Consumer demographics
- Traffic counts and travel patterns
Armed with these insights, new ventures can optimize for location while maximizing penetration and minimizing costs.
Healthcare and MedTech
During a medical emergency, once the patient is in the hospital, a call is sent out to alert any medical professionals available to perform the diagnosis or surgery. Often, it’s unclear whether the contacted professional is on-site or on-call.
In other words, patients are at-risk if practitioners can’t be easily located or are too dispersed during emergencies.
Innovative hospitals and medical centers are making use of big data analytics, IoT and location data to help solve these issues. With this information, they’re better able to track equipment, patients and personnel to provide better and more efficient care.
Let’s take a look at a study conducted by the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS). Findings showed that location data insights can optimize patient tracking, allocation of hospital beds and cleaning/maintenance.
Furthermore, location data can help reduce costs with overtime staff and underutilized mobile medical equipment. Managers can be informed of any excess spending on these resources.
With location data, hospitals are better able to track equipment, patients and personnel to provide better and more efficient care.
ThedaCare, for example, saved over $800,000 in reduced overtime staffing costs within the first year! The technologies they deployed monitored ward admissions and staff levels to make real-time adjustments according to current healthcare needs.
Finally, live location data can also provide caregivers and families with geo-alerts for vulnerable people, such as those with Alzheimer’s, who may wander and become lost. This is extremely helpful in improving the level of safeguarding for those with additional needs.
Governance and smart cities
The optimization of transport by urban planners using location data can help cities run more efficiently. Our recent video, for example, discusses how public transport services might use data gathered to avoid unnecessary trips to save on fuel.
But that’s not all. Location data can also be used to strengthen disaster relief efforts and emergency services, such as with Hurricane Harvey.
Research teams were able to identify the communities within areas at-risk of flooding just before the hurricane hit. They accomplished this by using geolocational data combined with predictive models of the flow of streams, rivers and other water bodies
Emergency responders and organizations were also able to better identify shelter locations and proactively relocate people before flooding occurred.
This is just one example of how location data can help coordinate humanitarian efforts. Armed with location-driven insights, relief workers and emergency services can deploy resources exactly where they are needed. Real-time data can also help locate people who are trapped, thus saving on precious time and resources.
Research and corporate intelligence
Geographical foot traffic data can also be used to quantify attendance and infer public interest at real-world events, demonstrations or protests. Specifically, campaign and event managers can better understand:
- Who their message is reaching.
- The societal support or weight of a particular issue.
Analyzing data sets, like foot traffic, against the sales of publicly traded retailers can also provide in-depth and timely market indicators for hedge fund managers to act upon. The same indicators can also provide value for competing businesses looking to steal some market share.
Within financial services, location data can provide fraud prevention teams with an accurate data to verify projected revenues. Auto insurers can benefit by adjusting rates and approving claims based on motor vehicle usage of their customers.
Location data can help everyone
The location data market is still fairly young. However, demand has been steadily growing over the last few years, especially in marketing and advertising.
Yet as more industries come to understand the value can be drawn from location data, we will see an increased demand for these datasets.
Demand for location data will continue to grow as its applications and use cases among both old and new industries are discovered.
By addressing the current imbalances faced by data providers and data consumers, Fysical hopes to be the marketplace of choice for physical movement insights in the near future. We want to make location data available for everyone.
What is Fysical?
Fysical is a location data marketplace protocol. We provide infrastructure for the transparent and compliant trade of location data on the blockchain.
You can join our Telegram Community here: https://t.me/fysical
Fysical homepage: https://fysical.org/
