From multinational retailers to niche high-street brands, businesses are leveraging location intelligence to gain a competitive advantage, delivering hyper local marketing campaigns that truly resonate.
The shift towards personalised marketing means one-size-fits-all strategies are fast becoming obsolete. Today’s consumers expect relevance, immediacy, and convenience, qualities that geospatial data is uniquely positioned to deliver. By integrating geospatial analytics into campaign strategies, businesses can align their messaging with a customer’s real-world context, optimising for both timing and location.
Area Prioritisation Engine by Ikano Insight is a prime example of this in action. Designed to identify where sales and marketing efforts will have the greatest impact, this tool uses geospatial analysis to help retailers make better decisions, faster. For businesses seeking to bridge the gap between data and action, it’s a game-changer.
Introduction to geospatial data in marketing
While traditional geolocation tools like geotargeting and geofencing focus on where a customer is in a given moment, more sophisticated approaches look at where high-value customers live, shop, and behave over time.
Rather than tracking fleeting or transient location signals, APE uses home location as a stable anchor point, layering it with:
- Historic purchase behaviours to understand what customers are likely to buy and when.
- Demographic and lifestyle segmentation to tailor messaging and channel mix
- Geodemographic profiling linked to spend patterns and competitive landscape.
This enables retailers and brands to pinpoint high-value audience clusters, not based on physical proximity to a store, but on long-term behavioural relevance. In doing so, they can identify the areas where marketing investment is likely to generate the greatest uplift in engagement and conversion.
For example, instead of targeting someone simply because they are near a shop, APE helps businesses prioritise entire postcodes or regions based on the density of lookalike audiences, propensity to spend, and alignment with campaign objectives. These insights allow for smarter campaign planning, selecting the right channels, messages, and locations to reach high-potential customers before the competition does.
The output of this process isn’t just a heat map of “where people are,” but a strategic prioritisation framework. This supports everything from new store expansion to direct mail targeting, influencer seeding, and regionalised digital campaigns. It’s a shift from tactical to strategic geospatial thinking.
While techniques like geotargeting and geofencing still have a place in broader omnichannel strategies, especially for tactical engagement or event-based messaging, it’s the intelligent integration of behavioural, demographic and spatial data that distinguishes APE. It enables marketers to act with precision, not just react to proximity.
How location data allows for personalised offers and promotions
One of the most impactful uses of geospatial data lies in its ability to support highly personalised, predictive marketing, not just real-time, reactive promotions. Instead of relying on technologies like GPS marketing or beacon-based notifications triggered by proximity, advanced tools like Ikano Insight’s Area Prioritisation Engine (APE) focus on deeper, longer-term indicators of purchasing intent.
APE enables businesses to deliver personalised offers based on where people live, their historic spend behaviours, and the demographic traits of their wider communities. By analysing trends across postcode clusters or catchment areas, brands can anticipate future buying signals and deliver timely promotions through channels such as email, social media, or even direct mail, long before a customer enters the decision phase.
For example, APE might identify a segment of suburban households with above-average spend on DIY products in the early spring. Rather than wait for those individuals to approach a store, marketers can proactively tailor offers to that group based on seasonal intent and purchase probability. This contextual precision, driven by data rather than device location, allows businesses to engage customers more meaningfully.
These personalised strategies are not only more relevant but also more efficient. By focusing promotional efforts on audiences who are demographically aligned, behaviourally primed, and geographically concentrated, brands significantly improve return on investment, without the need for constant real-time monitoring.
Targeting individual consumer behaviour based on location
In addition to immediate engagement, geospatial data is instrumental in predicting future consumer behaviour. By analysing historical location trends, businesses can build detailed behavioural targeting models that support both tactical and strategic marketing initiatives.
For instance, if a customer frequently visits a shopping district on Saturday mornings, campaigns can be scheduled accordingly. Artificial intelligence can incorporate supplementary data, such as weather, traffic, and local events, to further refine outreach. The result is a powerful combination of targeted advertising and behavioural insight.
This intelligence enables businesses to deepen customer relationships, delivering value-led interactions that feel personalised rather than intrusive.
Personalising customer experiences with location-based insights
Geospatial data also plays a critical role in shaping the in-store experience. By understanding how customers navigate physical retail environments, businesses can make data-informed decisions about store layout, signage, product placement, and staffing.
For example, real time location systems can track dwell time within specific areas of a store. If a significant number of customers linger in the technology section without converting, this insight can prompt the introduction of interactive displays or promotional support.
Additional tools such as augmented reality, in-app maps, and beacon technology can further enhance the customer experience. These enable personalised product recommendations, guided navigation, and gamified engagement, helping to align digital and physical touchpoints in a cohesive retail strategy.
Integrating geospatial data into customer journey mapping
To understand and influence today’s fragmented customer journeys, brands need more than isolated touchpoint data, they need location-informed behavioural insight. Ikano Insight’s Area Prioritisation Engine (APE) supports this by mapping customer value interactions across digital and physical environments using home location, historical purchasing behaviour, and demographic profiles.
Geospatial data helps uncover how and where high-value customers engage at different stages of the journey. Whether browsing online, researching in-store, or completing a purchase via mobile, it reveals key patterns and moments of influence. This enables accurate customer segmentation based not just on activity, but on real-world context and conversion likelihood.
By overlaying multiple data sources, such as spend history, mobility patterns, and competitor presence, APE ensures marketing resources are prioritised effectively. The result is smarter, data-led decisions about where to invest, which channels to activate, and how to streamline the path to purchase, ultimately enhancing both customer experience and return on investment.
Conclusion
Successful marketing requires a better understanding of who people are, how they behave, and where they live, rather than simply targeting them based on their location. Geospatial intelligence, enabled by solutions such as Ikano Insight’s Area Prioritisation Engine (APE), provides a significant benefit.
APE goes beyond typical geolocation strategies by merging demographic information, transactional data, and predictive behavioral modeling. The end result is a strategic marketing framework that allows firms to prioritise spending, fine-tune messaging, and target the most important locations and demographics based on long-term promise rather than temporary presence.
Businesses that include geographic data into campaign planning and customer engagement can increase ROI, improve agility, and form stronger connections with consumers in an increasingly dynamic industry.
Written by Matt Craddock
Global Head of Data & Analytics
Matt is a data science leader with expertise in heading up global teams that deliver game-changing solutions. He’s passionate about solving real-world problems with data-driven decisions, and combines hands-on technical skill with commercial insight to help businesses translate complex data into impactful outcomes.
