Knowing who your customers are is useful. Understanding where they are, what they have in common and where you can find more people like them is considerably more valuable.
Customer Intelligence brings together your own customer data with demographic, consumer and location data to build a clearer picture of the people already buying from you and the potential customers you haven’t reached yet.
For marketers, that can mean better targeting, more focused customer acquisition and greater confidence about where to invest your marketing budget.
What is Customer Intelligence?
Customer Intelligence is the process of combining and analysing customer data to better understand who your customers are, how they behave and what distinguishes your most valuable audiences.
Your own data provides an important starting point. This could include customer addresses or postcodes, transactions, purchase frequency, average spend, loyalty data or other information held within your CRM. But on its own, that only tells you part of the story.
Customer Intelligence can enrich this first-party data with information about demographics, consumer characteristics and the places where customers live, work and spend their time.
This provides valuable context around your existing customer base and can reveal patterns that aren’t immediately obvious from transactional data alone.
Understand who your best customers really are
Not every customer has the same value to your business.
Analysing your customer base can help identify the characteristics shared by your strongest customers, whether that’s based on spend, frequency, product choice, loyalty or another measure that matters to your business.
You might discover that your highest-value customers are concentrated within particular demographic groups or types of neighbourhood. Or that customers surrounding one location behave very differently from those around another.
These patterns give marketers a much clearer basis for deciding who they should be targeting.
Find more customers like them
Once you understand the characteristics of your best customers, you can start looking for similar audiences elsewhere. Customer Intelligence can help identify geographic areas containing a high concentration of people who share those characteristics.
For example, a retailer may have several stores with particularly strong customer penetration. By analysing the people buying from those locations, it can build a profile of its most valuable audiences and then identify other areas where similar people live.
Those areas could represent opportunities for customer acquisition, whether around existing locations or in markets the business hasn’t previously targeted. Instead of asking where should we advertise?, marketers can start with a more useful question: where are the people we’re most interested in reaching?
Understand how local context affects performance
The same marketing approach won’t necessarily work equally well everywhere.
Two stores may appear very similar but serve very different catchments. One might attract predominantly local families, while another draws commuters, students or more affluent customers from a wider area.
Understanding these differences can help marketers adapt their targeting, messaging and channel choices to reflect the audiences surrounding each location. It can also help explain why apparently similar locations perform differently. Rather than looking at customer data in isolation, adding location context provides a more complete picture of what may be driving those differences.
Focus local marketing where it has the greatest potential
Customer Intelligence can also help businesses decide where marketing investment should be concentrated. By comparing existing customer penetration with the potential audience in each area, marketers can identify places where there appears to be untapped demand.
An area with relatively few existing customers but a high concentration of people who resemble your best customers, for example, could be a strong candidate for an acquisition campaign. That evidence can help inform geographically targeted digital advertising, direct mail, out-of-home campaigns, local partnerships and other location-based activity.
Rather than applying the same marketing plan everywhere, activity can be focused according to the opportunity within each local market.
From customer data to better marketing decisions
Businesses already hold valuable information about their customers. The challenge is turning that information into something they can use. Customer Intelligence adds context to your existing data, helping you understand who your customers are, where your strongest audiences can be found and where future opportunities may exist.
Periscope® combines customer, demographic, consumer and location data to provide a more practical, place-aware view of your customers and potential audiences. That means you can improve targeting, focus customer acquisition and make better-informed decisions about where your marketing activity has the greatest potential.
Discover how Periscope® can help you understand your customers and find more of the right ones.
