What is indoor location intelligence and how can it be used by physical retailers?
In the technological era the moments we are separated from our smartphones are very rare. We nowadays carry them wherever we go, they replace wallets, purses and sometimes even the keys to our homes or cars.
Besides all the features the smartphones have, they carry the golden ingot of our times: data. Whatever we do with our smartphones we generate data and even just by moving we generate data related to our device’s position into a given space (indoors in our case). The data generated indoors is called indoor location data. This indoor location data can help retailers to better manage their visitor traffic by knowing their daily visitors, the visits patterns, the new versus returning visitors, the visits duration and frequency and to get even more actionable traffic insights and conversion analysis.
There are a lot of companies that focus on providing traffic monitoring solutions and calling it indoor location intelligence, but indoor location data is actually only the beginning of the process, indoor location intelligence having actually a much more complex architecture.
In essence, indoor location intelligence is the end product of a process that blends together raw location data, algorithms, machine learning and social sciences. It is actionable knowledge that can help retailers scientifically back their decisions related to products and customers.
Once the data is organised and structured it evolves into insights about shopping behavior, which is a major topic of interest for every marketing department. The next step is to load the insights with meaning, using machine learning and social sciences, and thus transforming data in intelligence.
As a product, Footprints for Retail’s indoor location intelligence solutions are a suite of software apps that retail property investors and retail innovators can use to:
- automate marketing processes and campaigns (thus decreasing costs);
- target their specific audiences that are relevant for their strategies with hyper precise accuracy;
- create a new income stream with mobile ads from other advertisers looking to engage with the visitors coming in the spaces’ that the retailer property investors control.
We cannot ignore the big elephant in the room, though. Because of the Cambridge Analytica – Facebook scandal, big data and predictive behavior got a lot of bad press, but the truth is that, used correctly, these are invaluable marketing and advertisement tools that come in the benefit of both companies and their audiences. It is clear though that regulation is required and we see the GDPR as a welcomed step in the right direction. At the end of the day, ideally, tech should help reduce fractions between fabrics of society, not tear them apart.
Indoor location indoor data, is in the process of disrupting the advertisement industry as we know it today and it will come in the benefit of the consumer the most, by freeing him from the non-stop assault of stimuli fighting to grab his attention.
One of Footprints for Retail competitive advantages is that we use the existing infrastructure with no extra investment needed. While a lot of the players in the industry are focusing on developing different types of indoor location hardware, which for a retailer means additional investment in tech that will start to deprecate the moment is installed, Footprints for Retail focuses on offering an integrated indoor location intelligence software solution, that works over the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth infrastructure that is already in place.
By applying this approach to all components, we can basically deploy and run a complete offline & online digital ecosystem for shopping malls, hypermarkets and retail networks with an ultra-low pricing that uses indoor location intelligence to create even further big savings in the marketing & advertising budgets.
We give retailers full ownership over their data. So, no other entities would have access to their data. Getting permission from customers to use their indoor location data is not only about marketing purposes. This is always about the value they get back. It can be about the loyalty rewards or the ease of navigation in indoor environments.
