Geospatial Data Analysis Services Provide a Wealth of Marketing Information

What started as an easy way to touch base with the location of your teenagers has turned into a tool for capturing the latest shopping coupons and in store offers. Through the use of geospatial mapping, parents are not only able to check the location of their teenagers, they can also access local restaurant and clothing boutique offers. Geospatial mapping is a platform that includes a dataset of locational information that is linked to specific geographic data like address, city, and ZIP code coordinate.

It only makes sense that the location technologies on our phones are being used for a number of purposes. From the decision to activate the GPS locators services to know where your children are, you are also enabling geospatial information systems as well. In turn, these marketing analytics services can be sold and used for other purposes. And while digital consumers are happy to use the free pizza coupons at the food court where they are shopping, many are starting to wonder why the same data that provides those coupons should be used for other marketing purposes.

Ads follow the interest of the person who is online. It is not the website provider that selects these ads, these ads are generated by the searches and the comments people make. In a time when one of the largest social media sites is dealing with compromised information it will be interesting to see what actions digital consumers take. Will they forego the conveniences of social media platforms to protect their privacy? Or, will the threat of information being used by marketing teams seem minimal in comparison to the personal gains that are available?

This is real. The exchange is not unfair. A number of social media users now use their accounts as much as two hours a day and during this time these digital consumers are providing a wide variety of information to potential and future advertisers. Transformational digital agendas sometimes catch people off guard, but the reality is that no adult consumer should have ever believed that their data was not going to be used for advertising and marketing purposes. In fact, even when they know some of their geospatial mapping data has been compromised, a majority of people will continue to use the convenient social media sites that have become a mainstay of today’s world.

Demographic reporting tools, geospatial mapping platforms, and other digital marketing strategies drive the economic decisions that are made every day. Just as newspaper and radio advertising in the past both tried to track the interests of consumers and spark purchasing decisions, today’s digital media platforms are doing the same.

• Statistics show that the world’s population will grow by 50% in the next four decades, reaching more than 9 billion, a substantial increase from the 6.5 billion now. This increase can also be seen as a prediction of how much more digital data will be available in the future.
• Estimates indicate that the geospatial industry generated as much as $73 billion in revenue in the year 2011 and also helped generate $1.6 trillion in revenue for the rest of the U.S. economy.
• A GPS receiver can measure and report the current time within 100 billionths of a second.
• Reprts show that the Internet of Things is having a major impact on the economy of the nation. The Internet of Things refers to devices, other than computers, that are online and can receive and send data. Although it only began gaining wide attention more recently, this term has been around for more than 15 years.
• Consumers drive the economy, so it should come as no surprise that every time a consumer conducts an online search they, too, are determining the future marketing campaigns that they will see.
• Having access to the digital date that marketers use is the result of the 24 active GPS satellites circling Earth.

Every time you SEARCH the internet for a piece of information, the location of a retailer, or the price of a product you are alerting marketing teams around the world to your interests. It should come as no surprise then that every piece of online digital data can be used to serve a variety of purposes.