Understanding the commercial places of interest that consumers visit is important to many businesses looking to better engage their customers. When you know where people go in the world, and what they do there, you can learn a lot about their interests, lifestyles, and habits. These real-world insights can then be paired with online behavior insights for a robust understanding of consumers’ behavior and buyer intent. Pseudonymous mobile location signals, when properly cleansed, aggregated, and enriched, give marketers access to these powerful offline insights. This data can be used to boost the performance of your ad campaigns, for competitive intelligence, and to improve your customer experience.

Gravy Analytics processes billions of daily location signals to build its industry-leading Data-as-a-Service, or DaaS, offerings. These product offerings include Observations, Visitations, and Personas. While Observations and Visitations are about understanding the commercial places and events people visit, Personas are about understanding consumers’ real-world behaviors over time. These location-based consumer Personas can enrich your understanding of your current customers to build a well-rounded and thorough profile of your target audience. Continue on to learn more about Gravy’s Personas.

Personas encapsulate the movement patterns of mobile devices throughout the physical world over time. Consumers’ real-world interests, life stages, and specific brand affinities are inferred to group mobile devices and to Personas.

Here’s an example of how a Persona can be created. If mobile devices are regularly observed at restaurants over several months, they belong to users that—depending on the restaurant type—are most likely  “Foodies,” “Fast-Food Diners,” or perhaps “Pizza Lovers.” Devices regularly observed at retail locations may belong to “Frequent Shoppers,” “Fashion shoppers,” or “Do-it-Yourselfers.” Devices that travel to and from work locations may belong to “Commuters” and “Business Professionals.” Meanwhile, those observed at toy stores and children’s events likely belong to “Stay-at-Home Parents.”

We ingest and process billions of location signals each month, so our consumer Personas are generated with meticulous real-world insights that can boost your marketing efforts and help you enrich your customer data in a variety of ways. Long-term consumer intelligence based on location-informed behaviors—like Gravy’s Personas— takes complicated infrastructure to observe and gives highly-reliable insight into what really drives a consumer.

One of the most powerful uses for Persona data is appending it to your current customer records. By understanding the various consumer personas of your customer base, you can instantly segment your customers into like-minded groups and increase your ability to effectively personalize your marketing and advertising. For instance, with the added real-world insights from Gravy’s Personas, you might design interest-based customer engagement campaigns or inform new products and services. You can even use your Persona data to find new, lookalike consumers that resemble your best customers, and target them with an acquisition campaign.

Best of all, because Personas are continually updated and refreshed, your customer data is continually refreshed as well. This lets marketers adjust their audience targeting and messaging in near real-time, as customer behavior changes. Why is this important? Major life events like moving or expecting a child, for example, signal a shift in interests and purchase intent. Keeping this behavioral information up-to-date lets marketers capitalize on these shifts and better anticipate their customers’ changing needs.

Online behavior metrics provide marketers with a means to deduce their customers’ interests and needs, yet they fall short in accurately reflecting genuine consumer interest and intent. But, when audience personas contain real-world insights, marketers gain a deeper understanding of their audience’s dynamic needs to inform business and marketing decisions.

For example, if a consumer is observed visiting a luxury automobile website and building a custom car design online, said consumer may initially seem like an in-market luxury car buyer. This may prompt a luxury car company to target this consumer in their advertising. However, what if this consumer’s real-world behaviors and travel patterns over time revealed that the consumer was not an in-market luxury auto-buyer, rather, someone who visited the website for entertainment purposes only?

With location-based consumer Personas, you might deduce that this consumer primarily uses public transportation or travels on foot and is not looking to own a car. Or, you might discover that this consumer visited used car dealerships in recent months, suggesting that they’re looking to buy something pre-owned. In these cases, visiting a luxury car company’s website is not accurately reflective of the consumer’s purchase intent, so targeting the consumer may not be a good idea. Without understanding consumers’ real-world behavior and interests, companies may not fully understand a consumer’s level of intent. Personas can provide added insights to buyer intent that may not be possible by observing solely online behavior.

Gravy identifies hundreds of unique behavioral profiles today, with more added every month. From “Amusement Park Enthusiasts” to “Parents of Teenagers” to “World Music Fans,” there’s a Persona that reflects your customers’ varied interests and affinities. This is the result of processing billions of location signals daily and using those signals to help you translate your customers’ behavior into affinities and needs. Personas are developed with privacy-friendly practices and location data forensics to ensure you have the highest quality of data.

To learn more about what location-based consumer Personas can do for your business, subscribe to the Gravy Analytics newsletter today.