Understand the Flow of Transit and People in Targeted Locations
With an estimated 4.68 billion phone users in the world, there is an immense amount of location data that can be harnessed through mobile devices. From understanding which intersections are busiest on a certain day of the week, which streets people prefer to walk versus bicycle, or what time of the day people frequent a shopping district there is exponential growth in the number of data points that can be collected to help you gain an understanding of a city’s pulse.
Thinking spatially can be a powerful advantage for any organization. But understanding all of the moving pieces in a city can be time-consuming and complicated. There are thousands of disparate data points that need to be collected and monitored to understand people’s behaviors in relation to movement patterns.
Understanding how place and location matter within your organization and how answering where things are can help you better understand your business problems. The location intelligence gained from aggregating movement patterns can help organizations understand public transportation needs, public safety, urban planning opportunities, consumer habits and so much more. Any organization can benefit from integrating geospatial data with its current operations.
What are Movement Patterns
When we say movement patterns we are talking about location intelligence or spatial intelligence, the process of deriving meaningful insights from geospatial data relationships to solve a particular problem. Location intelligence is comprised of location data or geospatial data, data that has an explicit geographic positioning component, which can be collected from mobile devices.
Location data can help an organization gain a more complete understanding of the flow of people in a region, city or targeted area. Utilizing location intelligence allows you to better understand human behavior and thus build strategies that best meet people’s needs.
The Value of Location Data
For any organization, location data presents an immense business opportunity by enabling organizations to bridge the digital and the physical worlds allowing for deeper insight and greater strategy creation.
Without location organizations are blind to the impact location has on business. Understanding how people interact in a given environment can expose unknown patterns or challenges, that can help private and public organizations better serve their audiences.
For brands, location data can unlock a higher level of insight about consumers that can be used throughout marketing and advertising efforts. The insight gained from understanding consumers movements around specific locations and timeframes can reveal key learnings and opportunities for expanding services or improving customer experiences.
For many organizations, a better understanding of traffic patterns might provide insights about where to place sensors within a smart city. There are numerous different ways that companies can leverage businesses to streamline business processes, manage risks and increase operational efficiency.
Use Cases
Movement Pattern data can be used in a variety of different ways. Some of the possible use cases include:
- Outdoor Advertising: Discover the optimal out-of-home (OOH) ad placement based on your key demographic audiences within a targeted area.
- Public Transit Measurements: Monitor the entire lifecycle of public transit (trains, buses, boats, etc.) including costs, service disruptions, commute times, common routes, demographic usage and more.
- Urban Planning: Understand the flow of people or traffic in designated areas to best suit your planning agenda.
- Freedom of Movement: Using a number of different factors, monitor and understand the capability of citizens to freely move in targeted areas.
- Foot Traffic Analysis: Discover the highest and lowest areas of foot traffic in targeted areas.
- Commuter Patterns: Gather information to help understand commuter patterns during the day and throughout the week so you can better deploy resources.
- Transit Monitoring: Monitor public and private transit routes via bus, car, bike, foot and other modes of transportation.
Conclusion
Without accurate location information, you can’t have an accurate understanding of your consumers. Simply relying on connected devices or digital data doesn’t tell the complete story that is vital when operating overseas. People are uniquely equipped to collect granular ground truth data that is needed to understand human behavior at the ground level. When local community members provide information they are able to provide a more authentic representation of an areas pulse.