Smart Steps: A leap towards smarter marketing

What is Smart Steps?

By calculating how many people visit an area by time, gender, and age, Smart Steps allows any organisation to tailor offers and services far more effectively. Smart Steps uses totally anonymised and aggregated mobile network data so there is no way a specific individual can be identified. It looks at crowds of people and is set to change the way we understand consumer behaviour forever.

Retail Week recently featured one dramatic success story. Following a campaign using Smart Steps, Morrisons announced a 150% increase in the number of new or reactivated customers who visited their stores. It’s an amazing result and demonstrates the power of aggregated, anonymous data.

Before Smart Steps, organisations like Morrisons sent out leaflets and promotions largely blind. Smart Steps showed where to focus the distribution of promotional coupons. It also indicated post code sectors where it was not worth distributing coupons and post code sectors which were already loyal to Morrisons or would revert to a competitor following the campaign. This meant money that Morrisons had previously been wasting could be allocated to sweet spots – post code sectors in which shoppers were willing to change their shopping habits with the right incentive.

Before Smart Steps, this level of insight was only available through loyalty schemes that take years and millions to implement successfully.

A smart marketing solution

As a tool, Smart Steps provides a variety of interesting ways for a business to gain clear insight of where anonymous crowds of consumers will be at any given time. It allows marketing departments to operate in a much smarter way and spend their budgets far more effectively.

Businesses can now understand where to position advertising and where to send door drop campaigns. Think about what organisations that hold customer events – such as festivals, sports games, concerts – can discover. Which music artist attracts which crowd? How do crowds differ from each sporting event? Where are the focal points and which areas are avoided?

Before and after the event is when people spend their money. They will often have a drink and talk about the event, or go to a restaurant. The right messages can establish greater loyalty with customers and provide a far more rewarding experience for visitors.

The good news is Smarts Steps is not just for retailers – it opens up a world of opportunity for businesses in every field to far more effectively plan and implement their direct communication with customers.

However, some businesses are missing out on opportunities because of a lack of expertise in crowd data analysis. This specialist knowledge is still limited in the current market. But that’s one of the reasons Smart Steps is so helpful. It’s easy to get accurate insights fast so businesses can quickly become more efficient in presenting customers with more of what they want. It really is a giant leap for marketing intelligence.

For more information about the ideas in this blog, visit o2.co.uk/retail. You can also follow Caroline on Twitter: @CarolineGorski