Welcome to the Location Data Blog!

Releasing a new consumer-facing physical product is difficult. In today’s hyper-competitive landscape, only companies that execute a data-driven marketing strategy during a product’s pre-launch, launch, and post-launch phases can expect to hit or even exceed – their goals. In this article, we elaborate on how businesses can leverage mobile location and Point-of-Interest (POI) data to make marketing initiatives across these three critical timeframes more effective.  

Urban planners and transport economists need location data to build better cities and facilitate equitable and convenient access to public transit. The movement of people within an area and between various Points-of-interest (POI) can provide valuable insights for city administrations, governments and businesses. Inaccessible facilities and public transit networks impact the socio-economic conditions of people living in an area, and therefore, affect the quality of their lives.  

Business Intelligence (BI) and data science companies harness location data to help their clients understand target audiences better. Insights derived from analyzing human mobility patterns can help retailers, FMCG, online services, and many other companies conduct effective marketing campaigns, expand to new areas, measure ROI, find underserved consumers, and more. 

A screenshot of Mapoteca’s analytics platform showing O-D analysis for specific POIs based on mobility data. 

Out-of-Home (OOH) advertising or outdoor media is integral to the multi-pronged marketing strategies adopted by consumer-facing businesses. Research has found that OOH drives more online activity per ad dollar spent than any other media. It is 382 percent more effective than TV, 200 percent more effective than print, and 63 percent more effective than radio ads in driving customers to an online platform. Outdoor media is instrumental for businesses to increase awareness of products and services - both online and offline. The market size is expected to reach US$ 33 Billion by 2027, exhibiting a CAGR of 13.41% during 2022-2027. 

In the aftermath of a disaster, access to relevant, high quality and timely information can greatly enhance the speed of emergency response by agencies and the effectiveness of government policies. The rise of signals and sensing capabilities, such as through privacy-compliant cell phone and GPS data can provide rich and rapid information about human location, activity and mobility. In a disaster recovery context, analytics based on mobility data can underpin socio-economic impact analysis.

The activity heat map displays normalized activity profile of Ambon Island for an average 24-hr day in Sept. 2019. Data are aggregated into hexagons, which are colored based on the count of unique devices by hour in each cell. This method highlights the most and least used locations at any moment in time. In the map above, yellow cells represent areas of high activity, or locations with the greatest number of people over the averaged 24-hr period. Source: Derived from Quadrant’s mobile location data.