Deck the Halls with Data

Elevating Holiday Marketing with Location Intelligence Across Dining, Travel, Retail, and More

Is it the holiday season already? For marketers, planning for the Q4 holiday season starts well before any Black Friday, Thanksgiving, or Winter Holiday activities have consumers diving into their pockets. We know that the months between November and January elicit the best advertising opportunities of the year as consumer engagement and spending soar. For example: 

But as holiday spending increases, so does the influx of holiday advertising. Marketers need to creatively break through the noise to connect with their audience, drive engagement, and exceed revenue goals. This is where Foursquare comes in – providing a comprehensive suite of location products and services built to help marketers thrive, including Audience, Proximity, and Attribution solutions.

The Gift of Location Intelligence 

Location data can be the shiny star atop the holiday tree for marketers – and what’s a tree without a star? Location data, such as foot traffic or visit data, is an essential tool for up-leveling targeting, measuring performance, and optimizing campaigns. In fact, nearly 90% of marketers said location-based marketing helped them increase sales, followed by growing their customer base (86%), and gaining higher customer engagement (84%). Let’s take a closer look at how marketers can leverage these insights to stand out amongst the cheerful clutter.

Targeting the right audience, at the right time, in the right place

Understanding your target audience includes a few factors: who they are, where they are, and how they behave. Location intelligence, like Foursquare Audience, gives marketers the ability to more effectively target specific audiences with ready-to-use audience segments as well as endless custom audiences. By better understanding consumer behavior – like where they shop, dine, and spend their leisure time – marketers are empowered to create highly personalized and relevant campaigns that pique consumers’ interests when they’re in the right mindset to buy. 

When time is of the essence, marketers can leverage over 1200+ ready-to-use audiences based on various characteristics such as demographics, visitation habits, online interests, and much more. Examples of holiday ready-to-use segments include Value-Conscious Consumers, Affluent Gift Shoppers, Winter Activity Enthusiasts, or Holiday Entertainers, to name a few. These audiences can be easily activated in your programmatic platform, saving you valuable time and enabling quick activation of your campaigns.

If you are looking for hand-tailored strategies, custom audience segments can be easily created in the FSQ Audience designer. For example, you can build audiences based on frequent visitors to fast-casual chains, fine dining restaurants, or even drive-thrus. By identifying and segmenting consumers based on historical actions, campaigns can be tailored to reflect the preferences and behaviors of these groups. This means creating specialized holiday promotions for loyal patrons of high-end restaurants, such as exclusive Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve dinner packages; retargeting frequent visitors of fast-casual spots, offering discounts on holiday-themed menu items or limited-time festive flavors to drive engagement; or competitively conquesting drive-thru enthusiasts with quick-service campaigns featuring convenient holiday meal bundles, catering to busy shoppers during the holiday rush. 

Another form of targeting is reaching consumers at the right place at the right time. Foursquare Proximity enables just that, allowing marketers to easily design geofences to reach consumers while they are out on the town. This capability is incredibly powerful for driving in-store traffic and boosting sales. For instance, during the holiday season when purchase intent is usually higher:

• Retailers can set up geofences around popular malls or holiday markets and send promotional ads to shoppers who are nearby, enticing them with exclusive in-store discounts or flash sales on holiday gifts;
• Amusement parks can use geofencing to target visitors at nearby hotels or holiday attractions with promotions on admission tickets or special holiday-themed events, and;
• Restaurants can target potential diners who are in the vicinity during meal times with special holiday offers or seasonal menu highlights, increasing the likelihood of attracting walk-in customers. 

By coupling Foursquare’s Targeting solutions, Audience and Proximity, together, marketers can ensure that their campaigns are not only reaching the right people but are also resonating on a deeper, more personalized level. This leads to higher engagement rates, increased customer loyalty, and ultimately, a more successful holiday marketing strategy. In fact, marketers can achieve a 202% ROI and a 47% lower cost-per-action (CPA) on average by leveraging Foursquare Targeting (Source: Forrester TEI).

Measuring campaign success & optimizing in real-time

Now that you’ve built tailored segments that meet your target market, understanding which strategies resonate most with consumers using reliable attribution tools can mean the difference between a successful campaign and one that gets lost in the holiday shuffle. Multi-touch attribution allows marketers to see the entire customer journey, identifying which touchpoints – whether they are digital ads, billboards, connected TV ads, streaming audio ads, or social media promotions – effectively lead consumers to physical store visits. With a multi-touch omnichannel product like Foursquare Attribution, marketers gain invaluable insights into how well their campaigns are at driving in-store foot traffic, even down to the performance of a specific ad or image creative. 

Moreover, with real-time measurement capabilities, marketers can stay agile and responsive throughout the holiday season. If a particular holiday-themed ad drives significant engagement, marketers can increase spending on those tactics or create similar content to sustain the momentum. Conversely, if some campaign elements aren’t delivering the expected results, these insights can be used to make adjustments on the fly, optimizing marketing dollars to be used more effectively and efficiently. 

For example, imagine running a cross-channel marketing campaign targeting high-income holiday travelers at airports. Your goal is to increase in-store visits to an electronics store for last-minute gift purchasing, whilst on their vacation as well as when they return home. With Foursquare Attribution, you identify that when running display ads on X and Y partner platforms together, the campaign generates significantly higher conversion rates. By focusing your budget on these top-performing tactics, you can save money and increase your earnings, making your holiday campaign as bright and successful as the season itself.

Additionally, measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) such as behavior lift provides more precise insights into how a consumer’s behavior is changing due to a particular ad or campaign. For instance, you can see whether your Black Friday campaign drove net new visitors into the store, or if current customers increase the frequency in which they visit the store after being exposed to the campaign. This allows marketers to accurately measure the incremental value their campaigns are fueling, taking into account historical behavior to more accurately measure performance. 

This data-driven approach to measuring campaigns enables you to refine your strategies and ensure your marketing efforts have a lasting impact on consumer behavior, ideally even far past the rush of the holiday season.

Get Started 

As the holiday season approaches, the gift of location intelligence can be the differentiator that sets marketers apart in a crowded and competitive landscape. By leveraging location data to target the right audience, measure campaign success, and optimize in real-time, marketers can create impactful and memorable campaigns that capture attention and drive tangible results.

Reviewed By: Arianna Vogel