What Is Location Intelligence?

Location intelligence (LI) is the process of enhancing business insights with geospatial data. It provides information about where and why things happen so you can identify patterns that impact business operations. Location-specific data—such as demographics, environment, weather, or traffic—provides a unique perspective for business decision-making. For example, traffic patterns help in logistics planning, demographic data supports marketing strategy, and geological data is necessary for site research. Location intelligence technologies support the collection, integration, and visualization of geolocation data with an organization’s other business analytics.

Location intelligence offers several benefits to businesses.

Improve customer experience

Location intelligence allows you to collect more information about your customers. You can launch targeted marketing campaigns with location data and personalize your services to a customer’s location. For example, a clothing store could recommend winter clothing to someone who lives in a cold location. Understanding customers more deeply allows businesses to accommodate them to a higher degree and improve their experience. Mapping the change in location-based data over time allows businesses to comprehensively understand customer behavior and market trends, providing a competitive advantage.

Enhance decision-making

Location intelligence adds a layer of spatial context to support decision-making. For example, location intelligence data in urban planning guides decision-making for infrastructure construction. Combining location data with demographics or information like the location of competitor sites supports organizations in their expansion strategies, resource optimization, environmental impact analysis, transport route optimization, and more.

Reduce operational risks

Businesses can use location intelligence to identify potential hazards and mitigate risks. Factors like natural disasters, limitations of the area, or urban hazards help businesses take preventative measures to prevent risk. For example, businesses can develop emergency action plans and familiarize local staff with how to proceed in these scenarios. Similarly, they can identify geographical locations that require additional resources or more services and the periods when the resources are critical.

Location and geospatial data have numerous use cases across a range of industries.

Retail and sales

Businesses can launch marketing promotions based on location data. Depending on where the highest density of customers resides, you can place a billboard or other marketing material to inspire sales. Valuable insights from location technology allow retail businesses to launch personalized digital campaigns based on customer location. Supermarkets also use location analytics to map customer foot traffic through the store. Using this data, they can position popular products along the path with the highest traffic to improve sales.

Urban planning and development

City zoning uses location intelligence to determine the best areas for future development. Analyzing spatial data lets you see which areas suit residential or commercial business zoning. City governments also use location intelligence to map out potential plans for public transport systems. Analyzing location data also allows businesses of any kind to determine where the best possible site for their new physical locations will be. You can use spatial data, temporal data of population density over time, and competitor locations to determine the optimal location for any business.

Healthcare

Location intelligence solutions are vital when predicting the potential spread of diseases through urban communities. It also offers insight to governments and medical facilities—they can take preventative measures to mitigate the spread of disease once identified. Healthcare providers can plan the distribution of medical services based on the population density of certain areas.

Environmental services

Location intelligence allows businesses to monitor the change in geospatial data over time. A prominent use case of this function is to monitor occurrences like rivers, forests, and natural habitats to trace how they change over time. Monitoring this information with location intelligence platforms can suggest how development has impacted the natural area to environmental agencies.

Location intelligence moves through a cyclic process of a few core steps to produce data.

Firstly, location intelligence platforms collect geographic data from any connected devices. These devices could be mobile applications, GPS devices, or any data from a third party. Depending on what a customer looks for, this data could include population density, geospatial aspects, or changes in data over time.

After collecting the raw data, you must clean it to remove any redundancies or information irrelevant to your business. Once you cleanse the data, you can use a geographical information system to identify trends and patterns.

You can then analyze and interpret data and generate insights to help inform business intelligence. This process is cyclic as businesses continuously ingest and analyze data.

Companies may encounter the following challenges with spatial data.

Data security

Businesses must follow data compliance regulations to maintain privacy when using location intelligence. Some regulatory bodies consider location data sensitive information, meaning businesses must always ensure it is kept private.

Location data quality

When conducting business intelligence, companies often attempt to collect as much data as possible to provide a comprehensive basis for analysis. However, businesses must ensure that all data they use is accurate and reliable. Location data quality issues can lead to errors and incur additional analysis costs.

Data volume

Businesses may encounter computing resource challenges due to the scope of their engaged data collection. Unless an organization is ready to process big data and deal with large location data volumes, it may struggle to find the resources to handle the additional demand.

Amazon Location Service makes it easy for developers to add location functionality to their applications—such as maps, points of interest, geocoding, routing, tracking, and geofencing—without sacrificing data security and user privacy. With Amazon Location Service, your business can:

• Rapidly deploy and accelerate application development.
• Easily integrate geospatial data into your applications for different use cases or geographies with data from multiple providers.
• Protect user privacy and shield sensitive data.

AWS Data Exchange is a data marketplace that allows customers to easily purchase and ingest geolocation data from trusted third parties. AWS offers a wide portfolio of constantly updating third-party data in one centralized catalog.

To get started with location intelligence with AWS, create a free account today.