In our digital and technology world your customers and prospects are expecting more from your business website. Research has shown that 80% of first contact from future customers or prospects will be via a search engine like Google or Amazon.com.
So, why noodles? Well why not!? It doesn’t matter what you manufacture, sell or distribute to resellers, the fact remains from a search engine to your website your prospects are looking for quick and easy information of how to buy or sample your product.
I mention noodles in the post as we have been recently working with a manufacturer of flavoured noodles for both retails and consumption through restaurants and specialist takeaways. They had built a fan base for their products via the company website but what a lot of customer queries had shown was that they wanted to easily find out where they could buy them from. Remember not everyone likes to buy food products online unless it comes and is delivered by a high-street supermarket brand, so this presented our noodle manufacture with a challenge.
Our customer had all the data about the outlets, takeaways and restaurants, and had tried to present this on a list on their website, but it was messy and gave no real indication to locations of where customers might visit.
This is where geospatial and adding Location Intelligence onto their website became a no-brainer. We took all the data, added some filters by product and location, added some additional information like parking and then published this as an external map for use on their website. The whole setup took less than a day and now customers who search for noodle outlets can search by product, location or by postal code.
This is how Mapsimise can help bring your data to life and share it with customers or future prospects via your website.
But the story of this simple geospatial data share for customers like yours via a website does not end there. Our noodle makers wanted to go one step further and analyse regional data for sales and popularity of product among customers. With this in mind we connected Mapsimise to the organisations Salesforce instance and mapped the regional sales. The main reason for doing this was so that the marketing team could target by area.
Many similar manufacturing and retail businesses like this and like yours can use geospatial tools like Mapsimise in the same way; to not only analyse data but to quickly give public access for customers and prospects when they need to search for services or outlets from your website.
Mapsimise provides the ability to create public maps that can be shared either by your business website, via a link sent to customers, or on the footer of an email if needed. Creating external maps is nothing new and you can employ the services of a developer or software company to build bespoke maps, but with Mapsimise there is no need as we do all the work necessary to help you do this and make sharing your data an effortless activity.
In helping the noodle company to achieve what was required, a number of scenarios were outlined to help the different business areas perform better.
Scenario 1 – Sales team members needed to plan time
One of the questions raised by the Sales Director was the need to make the sales team more efficient with planning time for appointments. We demonstrated the value in creating route plans with appointment schedules and now the sales team can plan their days by location based on customer information.
Scenario 2 – Customer engagement analysis
The management team also wanted to see where customers were in relation to the location of their stores and outlets to see which store had the most sales and the higher number of customers. This way they could define the marketing strategy by location. This was easily achieved by taking some information from Salesforce and from other data exports, giving the team a full picture of activity on a map.
Scenario 3 – Data selection for Marketing
Before having Mapsimise the marketing team used to send the same copy to all outlets and email the loyalty customers with the same information. Issues had been recorded that offers that had been sent by email to customers could not be redeemed at given outlets as they did not stock all products from the noodle company. Mapsimise helped display the right data by location and marketing could now build tailored marketing material by region.
As part of the process there were many different scenarios but these three seemed to be the ones that added the most value and helped the guys get the right noodles to the right people.
If you’re a business manufacturer or sells through retail, then Mapsimise can probably help your organisation sell, even if you don’t sell noodles.
How to get started with Mapsimise
If you are ready to get started, it's so easy! Start visualising your data on one or more maps by signing up to your own Mapsimise account and get started. Follow the steps below:
- Firstly, visit our website Mapsimise.com
- Click Get Started
- Select the package that suites your organisation
- Fill in the registration form
- Validate and log in to your Mapsimise account (by email)
- Add your billing information and select the connectors or upgrade from your Go Package
If you get stuck, you can sign into the Help Desk and raise a ticket with Mapsimise Support OR click here.
We look forward to working with you and helping you visualise your data, gaining location intelligence.
