Who's in your store right now? SAP's new data service can tell you

Marketers can tap virtually limitless volumes of data about customers’ online activities, but the offline world isn’t nearly as forthcoming. That’s where SAP aims to help.

The company on Thursday unveiled a new service that offers demographic data in near real time about the people currently inside a store or at a particular venue or event. Called SAP Digital Consumer Insight, the service taps consumers’ mobile data to deliver details on where they’re coming from, their age groups and gender, and the devices they’re using. 

Marketers can also benchmark one store location against another, compare two potential new locations, or see how well their marketing efforts stack up against the competition.

Data is anonymized and aggregated, so individual privacy is protected. Equipped with the result, marketers can tailor their advertising, proximity marketing, location planning, and sales strategies and campaigns to the people currently present at a particular location.