94% of respondents to a recent survey reported that analytics is key to their digital transformation and business growth. This is because business intelligence (BI) is critical to creating and maintaining a competitive advantage, providing insight into consumer behavior, trends, and improve efficiency, productivity sales and marketing.

Location data – raw, pseudonymous information from mobile devices – can be applied to enhance business intelligence, providing an additional layer of information that deepens insights and improves data-driven decision making. It also allows an enterprise to utilize mapping resources in existing BI tools, improving the functionality of existing systems for superior insight.

Here are five steps to enhance your business intelligence with location data:

Evaluate the capabilities of your existing BI tool. Does it currently include map and location functionality and if not, can that be added? If your organization is not currently using a BI solution, but you are thinking about implementing one, consider one that includes mapping or location intelligence capabilities.

Look at the trends that are currently affecting your business. Choose one of particular interest and take a deeper dive. Are you seeing a drop in sales at a store location? Pull the data related to sales, and see what you can discover.

Take the same trend and dive into it using location data. If you’re investigating a sales decline at a store, look at daily visitation or foot traffic data at that store. If you suspect that you are losing customers to a competitor, consider incorporating their data into your analytics for even more insight.

Use the business intelligence that you’ve generated and decide on a goal. In the example above, the goal could be driving traffic on certain days or times, increasing sales volume per customer, or retargeting customers that have defected to your competition. Build a strategy to drive results.

Put your strategy into practice, and be sure you regularly monitor results to see if your strategy is working, and if you are progressing toward your goal. Depending on the results, the strategy can be modified while in operation, to further improve results. 

Business intelligence may be the key to creating a competitive advantage for your business, providing insight that can be applied to supporting strategies and goals. The better the insight, the better your company’s advantage will be. Adopting location intelligence to enhance BI can deepen analytical insights, helping to better identify trends, challenges and opportunities that can affect your success.

https://www.microstrategy.com/us/resources/blog/bi-trends/4-striking-statistics-from-the-2020-global-state-of-enterprise-analytics-report