One of the most important aspects of marketing is knowing your audience. Where once advertising was about reaching the largest audience possible, now we know better. Research has shown that more successful marketing strategies do not cast a wide net, but rather a smaller one over the right audience. For example: if you are a single adult and see an advertisement for a child’s toy, you will likely ignore it and move on. You are not the target audience, and therefore the money spent on advertising the product to you is wasted. If a mother with a child sees that ad, she may think differently. Advertising to one mother who may buy that toy is more effective and less expensive than advertising to five single adults who are less likely to buy the toy. Marketing analytics services are making it easier for companies to understand their audiences through things like demographic reporting and geospatial data analysis. This involves collecting data about consumers — whether they are potential or current customers — and analyzing it to best understand things like which audience a company should target, who will spend the most money on a particular product, and more. The more you know, the less you’ll spend on pointless advertising — and the more money you’ll make.

The World’s Population Today

Marketing analytics are truly fascinating, because they are, in essence, based on studying the world’s population. The world is even bigger than you might think, with a population that is expected to grow by 50% in the next four decades. While it’s at about 6.5 billion people now, it will grow to over 9 billion people. As that number grows, so does the diversity of people. We all come from different cultural backgrounds, and for that matter different people will buy different things not just based on their innate personalities, but on how they were raised, where they come from, and even what age they are. Age is a major concern for the global population. It’s estimated that by 2030, every 100 workers in Europe will have to support 40 people 65 or older. This is compared to just 25 pensioners for every 100 workers in 2008. We know this thanks to Eurostat, the statistics arm of the European Union. While what marketing analytics services do is not exactly like what Eurostat does, they operate in similar ways and analyze similar types of data. But how do they get this data?

How We Collect Information

Marketing analytics services collect information about the population in many different ways. While some types of census are still taken by phone or even in person, we can gain a lot of knowledge through GPS satellite systems. It’s believed that there are always about 24 different GPS satellites circling the Earth — today it’s actually thought that there are 30, with a few spares floating about. Each satellite goes around the Earth every 12 hours. That’s a distance of 12,500 miles above us at about 7,000 miles per hour. While GPS may seem almost simple to us today — after all, how many of us have GPS systems in our cars? — the fact is that this technology can be remarkably precise. For example, a typical GPS receiver can determine the current time within 100 billionths of a second. But why is that we care about this kind of data, and how does it relate to marketing analytics?

How This Data Relates To Business

A Dresner Advisory Services survey says it all in regards to how this kind of data relates to business. Over half of all respondents from a variety of different industries indicated that locations intelligence is critically or very important to their business planning. Knowing this kind of information tells you more about your audience, and you’re able to plan accordingly. It’s not information that is necessarily critical to every aspect of advertising, but it can make or break an ad campaign, and can seriously affect how a company moves forward.