Last Updated: September 2026
In Wavestone's 2024 survey of chief data officers, 87.9 percent rank data and analytics investment as a top organizational priority. The harder question is what that investment actually produces for the customer relationship.
Consumer data can be gathered from a variety of sources. But the data a company stores in its customer relationship management (CRM) system often has a strong demographic focus. That kind of customer data may be accurate, but it doesn't provide a complete picture of what consumers actually want. Sources like location data help complete that picture.
Consumer data enrichment provides a comprehensive view of customer behavior, making in-market analytics possible. From there, businesses can directly reach consumers who are in the market for specific products and services, which can significantly increase the ROI of advertisements, email marketing, and other customer communications.
How Consumer Data Enrichment Affects Customer Experience
Consumer data enrichment applies additional third-party data to an enterprise CRM or database. Brands that actively enrich their data can build on what they've already gathered, helping them make more informed decisions and improve business outcomes.
When it comes to enhancing the customer experience, consumer data enrichment is used to learn more about customers and what they're interested in. That information is then applied to communication, marketing, sales, and other business areas, all with the purpose of making every customer interaction more valuable. For example, say a retail brand wants to engage Gen Z shoppers. Demographic information alone makes that hard: it describes who the customers are, but not what they do. The brand decides to enrich its consumer data with location intelligence. Now it can see how that target market moves through the world and which places and categories they return to. With that fuller picture fueling campaigns, the marketing team can write messaging that speaks directly to what customers are actually interested in, rather than to a demographic profile that resembles them.
That connection has to be made somewhere, though. A CRM record is usually anchored to an email address. Location behavior is anchored to a pseudonymized mobile advertising ID. Joining them takes an identity layer that links hashed emails, device identifiers, and IP addresses, along with context on when each connection was observed. Without that layer, third-party behavioral data sits next to your customer records instead of enriching them. The same principle runs in the other direction: demographic attributes layered onto observed movement answer what kind of person is behind a pattern, not just where the pattern occurred. Both directions depend on consent and documented provenance — behavioral data that can't show where it came from is a liability in a CRM, not an asset.
Standard information on age and marital status likely won't cut it on its own in today's hyper-personalized world. Companies need data that captures what customers actually do. Unlike other consumer data enrichment sources, location intelligence is based on observed behavior in the real world rather than what customers say about themselves — the classic distinction between stated and revealed preference. Surveys capture the former; movement data captures the latter, at scale.
4 Types of Data to Enrich Your CRM
Location intelligence can be applied to multiple business areas. To improve the customer experience, there are four key types of data derived from location analytics that you should consider adding to your CRM.
1. Consumer Interests
As in the example above, consumer interests can take your marketing efforts to the next level. Everyone has a unique collection of activities, interests, and pursuits that drive their behaviors. Location intelligence provides a wealth of information about those interests, hobbies, and activities. If location data shows that your customers attend farmers markets every month, then healthy food is likely important to them, and you can craft campaigns around that interest or reach customers directly around their favorite food-related events.
The stronger version of this is a defined segment. A device qualifies by meeting specific, documented criteria: the types of places visited, how often, and over what period. That's what makes an interest segment defensible when a client asks how you know.
McKinsey's 2021 research on personalization found that 71 percent of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76 percent get frustrated when that doesn't happen. The same research found that companies excelling at personalization generate roughly 40 percent more revenue from those activities than average performers.
Demographic and purchase data can tell an organization basic information such as a customer's age, gender, and shopping history, but knowing that a 64-year-old purchaser of household items is also a biking enthusiast and wine connoisseur opens up a variety of opportunities for a marketer to reach that consumer, improving CX and increasing the odds of conversion and long-term loyalty.
2. Brand Affinities
Creating an emotional connection that makes customers relate to your brand is something every company wants. Getting this right means a brand's public values actually match what its target audience cares about.
For example, if a company's customers are focused on charity and volunteering, advertising corporate social responsibility (CSR) or "sincerity" branding will land better than, say, "sophistication" branding built around luxury, which is more likely to alienate that audience than win it over.
Location intelligence provides insight into consumer affinities based on information such as events attended or retail locations frequented, including which competitor locations a customer also visits. All of it speaks to preference and priority in ways a brand can act on directly.
Understanding consumer affinities builds and strengthens the emotional bond between customer and brand, creating the foundation for a lasting relationship. It can also open up opportunities for sponsorship or co-marketing with brands that share a similar audience.
3. In-Market Buying Behavior
Of everything on this list, this one is the most immediately actionable. Businesses need quick turnarounds to stay competitive, and there's no faster way to get there than acting on in-market buying behavior. Consumers who are "in-market" are actively looking to purchase a specific item, product, or service. Knowing what your consumers are in the market for lets you reach them at the moment they're most likely to buy, with a message built to convert. In-market buying behavior can draw on past actions like purchase history or store visits, current actions like product searches, and predictions of what a consumer is likely to do next.
For example, say a car dealership is struggling to connect with the right audience. Fliers and broad digital campaigns haven't moved anything. The dealership instead reaches only the consumers who have recently visited other dealerships, auto supply shops, mechanics, and car shows in the area.
The value here is timing: in-market windows are short, and a signal that a customer visited three competitors last week is worth more than a demographic attribute that's been true for a decade.
4. Visit Data Patterns
Visit data doesn't just tell a business how often consumers visit a specific store or location. It can also show how many visits typically happen before a purchase, how far consumers travel between locations, and what other stops they make along the way.
It's worth separating three things that often get lumped together under "visit data." A visit is time spent at a named commercial place: it tells you where someone went and how long they stayed. A dwell is meaningful time spent in an area with no commercial place attached, which is what you rely on outside a mapped location library. And a recurring location is a place a device returns to again and again, represented as a geographic center point rather than a named venue. That third category is what supports origin-and-destination analysis, commuter flows, and the question of how far a customer will realistically travel to reach you.
When companies analyze visit data over time rather than as a single snapshot, patterns emerge that a one-time read can't show. That's what supports better decisions on ad targeting, segmentation, measuring marketing effectiveness, expansion, and cross-promotional opportunities.
Improve Key Business Metrics with Consumer Data Enrichment
Consumer data enrichment is one way a company can improve customer acquisition, retention, and conversion. Location intelligence contributes the behavioral side of the picture: interests, habits, and the places customers keep returning to. Demographic and identity data ground that behavior in who's actually behind it, and connect it back to the records a company already holds. The result is a CRM built on what customers actually do.
Want to explore how consumer data enrichment with location data can power your business? Book a meeting with us today.
