Last Wednesday, I visited a Geomarketing congress organized by my alma mater and Geodan. In this post, I’ll discuss how geomarketing on both a macro-level and a micro-level gives you more pieces to the customer puzzle.

Geomarketing focuses on the relationship between spatial awareness and marketing. Here are some of the real-life cases that were presented:

• Understanding customer motives for visiting certain car dealerships
• Determining the location of a new store
• Plotting and targeting households for effective direct mail campaigns

These are all very good and relevant examples of how location affects the marketing process and how proper geomarketing can improve the rate of success. However, they’re all examples of how to perform geomarketing on a macro-level.

Even modern mobile applications like Foursquare operate mostly on a macro-level. People check into a drug store, a restaurant, a train station, et cetera. It can be good information for your business, but it doesn’t tell you how they move about while they’re at your store for example. This is where geomarketing on a micro-level comes in.

The presentation I found most interesting was by Prof. Dr. Jaap Boter who was also my thesis supervisor back when I was graduating. Prof. Boter performed research at a bookstore where customers were asked to wear RFID tags while they were shopping for books. When leaving the store, these customers filled in a questionnaire, and—if they had made a purchase—the receipt was included as well.

Using this information, it became possible to track customer movements inside the store, which revealed interesting insights such as:

• The behaviors of various customer segments
• The differences in customer behavior on different days (e.g. Saturday versus Monday)
• The effectiveness of the store’s layout

These are all very interesting and important bits of data that help you understand the consumption process. Loyalty programs, CRM systems and macro-level geomarketing can help you understand (some of) the causes and effects of a purchase, for example:

• A cause like someone lives near the store so s/he was inclined to visit it
• An effect like someone makes large or frequent purchases
• A cause and effect like a man making a purchase because it’s his son’s birthday

This is also very valuable information, but it doesn’t reveal much about the process. Was this man looking very long for his son’s birthday gift or was he helped out quickly by a store clerk? The combination of customer data, both on a macro-level and a micro-level, help you understand your customer better.

How closely are you stalking your customers?

The Fundamentals series continues this week with a look at how social media has impacted marketing. This will be a three-part series that looks at marketing in general, public relations and advertising. At the end, I’ll present what I see as the “Online Value Framework”.

For marketers, the fundamental power shift from organizations to individuals has also been noticeable. With individuals being able to talk back, one-directional mass marketing has lost its edge as a way to get a message across.

However, social media is not there to emphasize polarization. It is there to promote relationships. Just like any relationship, the business relationship between marketers and consumers is a game of give and take. Marketers will need to give (attention, value, quality et cetera) in order to take (money, positive brand perception et cetera).

When a marketer does not give enough, the consumer will lose interest and the marketer is unable to take from the consumer. The opposite holds true as well, a marketer who gives something relevant consistently builds a relationship where consumers have higher levels of brand perception and trust.

Marketers still need to remember that taking is also part of the relationship. Exchanges like a value proposition and a call to action for giving a product or service with real benefits and value keep the relationship real. Remember that relationship marketing is not solely about relationships, it is about marketing as well.

Social media has also made relationships branch further than the exchanges between an organization and an individual. Individuals are also building relationships of trust and value among each other. As such, organizations may not be the de facto source of trusted information for consumers. The relationships consumers forge with each other can negate the relationships that organizations have with consumers. However, they can also be amplified as positive exchanges between organizations and consumers are shared and expanded through consumer-to-consumer relationships.

As a result, social media marketing is not about marketing to people but marketing with people. Social media does not belong to anybody. Marketers and consumers both inhabit and populate the social media space. The relationships between people are built on relevance, attention and trust, and these relationships are built through an on-going series of exchanges and experiences.

Since no-one owns social media, marketers and organizations cannot own these exchanges and experiences either. However, they can facilitate them. It is up to marketers to go beyond campaigns and to establish relationship platforms that host the exchanges and experiences among consumers and between consumers and organizations.

Examples of platforms that organizations can create are:

• Experience Platforms Elevate the organization’s offering from just products or services to a platform where the brand experience can be shared. For example, a food manufacturer can start a community where consumers can share recipes and cooking tips.
• Crowdsourcing Platforms Activate and leverage the knowledge and expertise of consumers to make them the drivers and creators of ideas, content and changes. Crowdsourcing increases consumer participation and sense of involvement while it provides the organization with feedback that is market-relevant.
• eCommerce Platforms Extend the online presence and direct people traffic to a branded store environment. This decreases the odds of people from leaving the branded website to a different eCommerce environment or to an offline store.

The chosen platform(s)—whether it is a self-hosted platform or a 3^rd party platform (like Facebook)—must still tie into the principles of establishing relevance, attention and trust.

The comments are yours.

I encountered a great example of this the other day. My business partners and I needed new business cards and we had already established contact with a printer. There was, however, a miscalculation/misunderstanding that led to a price that was much higher than was originally quoted/estimated. Instead of pressing the issue, we settled on a compromise. The printer might break even or make a minor loss now, but they know that we would come back for more when needed. There’s also the additional business of letterheads, envelopes, brochures, et cetera. They understood that making this investment/sacrifice would benefit them over time.

Understand that your customer is an investment. Take the long-term return on your investment into consideration.

• Awareness: When a consumer is first exposed to your product. Examples are reading a review or seeing an ad.
• Interest: When a consumer becomes interested in purchasing your product/service. Examples are visiting the shop or trying out the product.
• Purchase: When a consumer buys your product/service.
• Service / Re-Purchase / Renewal: When a consumer comes back with a problem or with an intention to re-purchase/renew.

Social media provides new opportunities to enhance the customer contact cycle with new customer touch points. Using tools like Facebook and Twitter, it’s possible to have a continuously open channel with customers. Leverage social media as customer touch points to increase interaction with current and prospective customers, create an open brand image and enable cross-selling and up-selling.

Take advantage of social media to enhance your customer contact cycle.

Have you set up listening tools, such as Google Alerts, or are your agencies/partners listening to the feedback that is given in your consumer community? Are you actively searching for mentions of your brand/product/service or even actively reaching out to the community to provide feedback to you?

Your community of consumers has a lot to say and has a lot of platforms to say it on. Stay on top of the content related to you and take what’s being said into consideration.

Listen. Validate. Act.

Allow what people are saying to matter. Embrace and appreciate the fact that people are taking their time to talk about you.

I came across an interesting case recently where a client more or less demanded a service agency to invoice less—despite delivering all the services as described. Not only is this morally unfair, it’s disrespectful.

You get what you pay for. You pay for what you get. Don’t destroy a potentially solid long-term relationship by making the wrong one-time decision. Go for the best that your organization can get, the price will justify itself.

As David Schwartz alluded to in his book “The Magic of Thinking Big” (Amazon link): Go first class, you can’t afford not to.