Why Do Automotive Marketers Need Location Data into Their Strategies?

The automotive industry has always been an early adopter of innovation and providing myriad opportunities based on location data to drive real-time asset tracking and data analytics. Location data makes it possible to lower distribution costs, surge capital returns, and drive customer loyalty. While marketers in the sector are relentlessly seeking new ways to disrupt fences to car buying that reduce consumer friction, location data has the potential to assist them in addressing the issue. It offers an affluent source of information regarding consumer behaviors, competitive intelligence, and market trends.

In the automotive industry, the challenges of production begin before the assembly line. Besides, issues around warehousing, supply chain and others must be addressed and managed in an effective way that help avoid backups, bottlenecks and, most significantly, downtime. Thus, location data technology can provide carmakers and component suppliers the ability to employ location tracking solutions for inventory management. This could save tens of millions of dollars each year on audits, control, and reduce inventory losses.

For the Tier II marketers, location data is critical as it lets them zero in on consumers who are in their market range and reach those likely to visit a specific dealership in the area. Though the location data can be easily understood for Tier II marketers, the way of targeting customers have since evolved as the location data solutions are becoming more sophisticated.

Embracing location data can also assist marketers in collecting critical insights into their target consumers. In a study, 45 percent of automotive respondents reported the lack of data or visibility into campaigns as a key challenge in executing on their priorities. Conversely, 61 percent of automotive marketers are highly likely to leverage location data to assess customer behavior at dealerships.

Location data equips marketers with insights by enabling them to comprehend which aspects of their marketing and promotion actually drive real-world behaviors, stores or dealership visits. This is significant because having an understanding of trends and patterns in consumer behavior such as where they shop or socialize most allows tailoring messaging to consumers' personal interests when they enter a dealership.

As mobile usage is rapidly growing worldwide, it gives opportunities to marketers to personalize their services using mobile devices. Building direct relationships with customers through mobile apps already proves an effective approach to garner more market revenue. Now using mobile apps to generate location data, coupled with demographic information, offers marketers tremendous insights on customers' preferences. It doesn't only allow them to augment customer loyalty, but also provides the breakthrough to know their audience better.

Auto marketers may be enticed to deploy location intelligence to a wide range of dilemmas. So, it is essential to better start with a single application and expand gradually and by focusing on one single aspect, they can considerably improve in one area, before continuing to implement location data to other functions of their company. Moreover, location intelligence performs as a media-agnostic measurement metric as it helps cement the gap between online and offline consumer actions.