Restaurant Marketing & Customer Experience Blog

Using Location Analytics To Drive More Business Revenue

Written by Edward Kennedy | Jul 1, 2020 12:36:00 PM

If your location-based marketing campaign doesn't incorporate location analytics through wi-fi access points, you are missing a huge opportunity to improve the return on investment of your marketing dollars. 

As any brick and mortar establishment marketer knows, it's all about the traffic. 

So what brings your customers in, what drives them to stay, and how you can get them to come back are powerful marketing nuggets that the savvy marketer should be mining from their wifi location analytics. 

Not all social wifi networks are created equally.  

Some social wifi instruments are great at providing wifi service for your customers. That's a wonderful advantage and powerful incentive for customers to shop with you.  

But there are other "smart" wifi networks that offer location analytics; rich traffic-driven data about most of the foot traffic that enters your store.  

There is an incredible amount of customer data potentially available through intelligent social wifi including customer visits, length of visits, return visits, and much more.  

Wouldn't it be great to know what days of the week your customer prefers and even what they buy. And at some point, to incorporate social media and customer engagement based upon your skillful ability to hone your marketing campaign based on real time data analytics.  

A smart wifi system can provide powerful location based marketing analytics. 

Location analytics should be a core business marketing tool. Without understanding when people respond to your marketing campaigns to visit your location, or make a purchase, your marketing will be buckshot - hit or miss, at best.  

Location based analytics can be gathered even if visitors do not sign into your WiFi.  Yes, your visitor doesn't even need to sign onto the WiFi.

Anonymous information is captured including length of visit, traffic patterns, time of day, and even repeat visits. Powerful. 

Location analytics are vital for smart location based marketing to become more efficient, more effective and more profitable.  

Here are 5 steps to drive more business through location analytics gathered through smart social wifi:

1) LOCATION ANALYTICS REVEAL WHAT DRIVES CUSTOMER VISITS

Many marketing campaigns are based partially on fact, partially on experience and partially on a hunch.

You have an educated concept of who the target marketing persona is, and you believe you have nailed customer motivating factors.  

But how can you know for sure whether your marketing campaign is on target?  

Location analytics captures traffic data regarding customer visits.  

Does traffic increase when you run the campaign? Does it stay the same? Are you attracting new prospects or are customers making return visits? Even time of day traffic can be segmented and evaluated.  

To understand what is driving business, it's critical to measure which marketing message or media is impacting visits.  

And in a location-based business, more visits are the lifeblood of your campaign. More visits means more opportunities for sales. 

2) LOCATION BASED ANALYTICS FROM WIFI REVEALS WHAT DRIVES RETURN VISITS

Location analytics through social wifi not only provides a data trail to improve marketing messaging, it also can reveal return customer business.  

Campaigns designed to reach first time consumers versus driving return traffic can be measured based upon consumer's activities.  

Smart wifi is able to distinguish when a customer comes back, and over time this is a powerful way to define campaigns based upon traffic goals, then determine whether the messaging is working with real location data.  

Without this information, your marketing dollars can be spent on endless campaigns and even repeated campaigns that could be ineffectual.  

Instead, real-time traffic analytics can validate marketing effectiveness.   

3) MARKETING CAMPAIGN MESSAGES REFINE AND IMPROVE BASED UPON LOCATION ANALYTICS

Real time location analytics provide insight to marketing improvements and whether they are effective.    

For example, if the ultimate marketing goal was customer retention, location analytics are helpful in providing baseline data as well as metrics to measure against.

Once a baseline is established, messaging can be refined on an ongoing basis.  

With real time traffic intelligence, the marketing campaign can be tested and continuously improved while results can be realistically measured in real time.  .  

4) REVISIT CAMPAIGNS WITH MORE EFFICIENT OFFERS BASED UPON SMART WIFI DATA

Over time, as data is gathered, you will be able to weed through offers to find those that resonate with the target customer group.  

From there, testing other offers will hone in on what works the best.

Inefficient marketing campaigns can be reduced or eliminated yielding greater return on marketing investment. 

For example, it would be best to measure what customer retention is like initially through these wi-fi access points.

If customers enter, but do not stay long - how long are they staying for total?

And then after you have developed and deployed marketing efforts to boost retention rates, look at the analytics again. Is there an improvement in the numbers? If not, what needs to be done to improve?

This will help improve and enhance marketing efforts in order to drive long-term, sustainable success.

5) DATA THROUGH INTELLIGENT SOCIAL WIFI RESULTS IN IMPROVED RETURN ON INVESTMENT

As data points are gathered, eliminating inefficient marketing programs will result in cost savings, as well as creating more effective marketing campaigns.  

This has the effect of improving return on marketing investment through smart social wifi. 

Using location analytics through wi-fi access points is one of the best ways to gain a direct channel of insight into customers.

It provides a level of insight that may not be possible through other ways, but having location analytics will help propel a business to improve and enhance current offerings in a much more targeted way for maximized success.