With markets making their way out of the pandemic, location data can help businesses identify shopping behavior changes and formulate marketing strategies for returning and new customers. According to PlaceIQ’s Duncan McCall and Foursquare’s David Shim, these types of strategies are more effective when combined with economic and psychographic information to build diverse target audiences.
“What we’re seeing is, as part of the reset, past behaviors aren’t going to be as actionable because people have not gone into store locations,” Shim said, emphasizing that understanding which audience segments are currently making in-store visits is essential due to the lack of relevant data during the lockdown period. “You have to almost consider [that] these are all new customers for the next few weeks, for the next month,” he said.
With the unemployment rate being quite high, many customers are reacting by tightening their budgets and saving more, making audience segments built before coronavirus surfaced less relable. “I think you’ve got to layer all that psychographic and behavioral information, as well as macroeconomic information, on top of the location information to really tell the full story,” McCall said.