Geo-marketing capabilities enable telco operators to use intelligence from specific regions to take necessary actions to outsmart the competition.

How does geo-marketing help?
Geo-marketing analytics enables telco operators to use geographical insights to plan marketing and sales activities. By using geography to segment needs, value, and behavior data, telco operators are able to see valuable information about customers that may be hidden when looking at average values across the entire enterprise.

Geo-marketing initiatives provide deep analysis about untapped insight, which provides four distinct benefits to telecom companies:

1. Acquire new customers
2. Fight churn and retain customers
3. Grow usage within their customer base
4. Save money

Acquire new customers
Since many executives look at average acquisition rates across the entire subscriber base, some geographies with acquisition rates lower than average are neglected. Companies just don't focus their marketing or sales resources on these areas. But geo-marketing enables operators to track these areas more efficiently and take necessary actions to improve the results for specifically defined areas. For example, one reason for low acquisition rates in an area may be a local acquisition campaign run by competitors. Geo-marketing analytics raise a red flag for companies, so they can conduct detailed research to understand the reasons behind the problems and take action to make improvements, such as new acquisition campaigns in a particular region.

Fight churn and retain customers
Telecoms also have the power to track churn rates in many locations. Those places with higher churn rates than the average can be monitored with the help of geo-marketing. Intense local competition or dissatisfaction with the in-store sales experience can be potential reasons for the higher churn. A company can focus on these areas, for example, and may divert the core operations of the store from handset sales to retention. It may also design more relevant local retention campaigns rather than a mass one, which decreases the risk of unnecessary money loss caused by retention campaign discounts.

Grow usage within the customer base
Geo-marketing also enables telecoms to track revenue growth with their existing customer base. As an example, geo-marketing analytics help to detect some areas where upsell efforts do not work, even though they work for similar groups of customers in other areas. One of the reasons can be that wait times are long at a particular store, resulting in a drop in customer visits. With this information, a telco can make the decision to open a second store in the area or change the layout to appeal to these types of customers to spur increased upsell rates. Geo-marketing also helps to decide where to open this shop based on the mobility information of customers living there.

Save money
Geo-marketing analytics can help operators minimize their costs as well. By understanding usage patterns of customers down to the neighborhood level, companies can invest in SMS messaging for one group within a city and in-store signage for a particular neighborhood store. In addition, by analyzing network data, the operator can see where its customers go, and buy billboards only in places frequently passed by its customers. A company can save much of its marketing budget by using geo-marketing analytics.

Geo-marketing in action
How can operators make the most of geo-marketing? The first step is to define where each subscriber resides. Many operators assume that people live in the places where they buy their SIM cards, but the reality is different. People mostly live in the places where they use their phones. For example, people are more likely to reside in the places where they talk on weeknights or on the weekends.

After defining where their customers reside, telco operators must determine which geographical areas to monitor. They may want to track areas with a population over a determined threshold or the areas where they have a certain number of sales in stores. They can segment customers based on the area where they reside. Once segmented, operators can determine the most relevant KPIs to track and look at the data to understand how to best serve customers in different regions.

Conclusion
The examples above show only a small part of geo-marketing's benefits. Many improvement opportunities can be found by tracking how telco operators' performance differs in the various regions they serve. At Peppers & Rogers Group, we are building the platform to track KPIs at the regional level and also help companies to define regional-based strategies to convert underperforming regions into best practices. It's another tool in a company's arsenal of customer-based strategies.