Understanding your market and share by location.
Hi, I’m Alistair Dickinson, and I’m the CEO of Mapsimsie.com
In this Blogcast I’m sharing my thoughts on using Location as a key component to understanding your business market share, and how you can cluster your data to build that view.
So, what is Market Share, what is Location and Geotargeting? where are you most effective with sales, and where are your customers!
How do you plan your marketing by location!
All pretty good and valid questions in today’s online world of business, right.
So lets see if we can unravel all this to give you real insight to what is happening and where.
Ok, you might not care, you might just want to keep churning the ad spend and getting customers through the door the old adage of “SHOW ME THE MONEY”
And I guess that is ok, but in this week’s BLOGCAST I’m hitting the breaks and taking a look at how you can use technology like Location Intelligence, to actually understand your market, how you can visualise your market and focus on why you do well in certain locations or countries, and not just as a whole.
As a business you will have all sorts of data, customer, sales, and finance just to mention some different types, but 80% of that data you already have has a location address element.
This means you have a real asset that can be a benefit in your business because all the data that is addressable can be plotted and analysed on a map and analytical views can be easily built.
Ok, this might not mean a lot, or you might not think that it has any real value, but in this BLOGCAST we are looking at what is possible using the data you have, and how it can enable you to build up a view of where your business is geographically successful.
Now let’s consider two examples that are the reverse of each other, one is an ecommerce business which is online only, the other is a hotel, one is selling a service as an overnight stay, the other is selling consumer products that are delivered by a 3rd party
Let’s consider the hotel first and give a valid example of why location can be used to benefit the hotelier / owner who could be you.
For the sake of this example, I’m using an average economy sized Hotel that may have about 60 rooms available at any one time. The objective as a hotelier is to fill and take bookings for all those rooms consistently and sell add on services like restaurants and facilities.
Most service sector businesses will have an epos system (Electronic Point of Sale) If it is a modern electronic POS solution then payment may also be taken online. As a hotelier you may also use 3rd party platforms and portals to help drive additional sales.
Now I guess there are two main scenarios there will be business customers and vacation customers, lets first look at the business customer that maybe staying one or two nights for meetings or an event.
It is very likely that your ePOS system will have a lot of historic data on customers that have stayed, using location analysis as a hotelier you could use this data to target existing customers this is what we call Geotargeting, and it means you can use your data to focus on marketing activity to customers by location.
Location can play apart and as a hotelier if you are near an event or activity centre you could share related information with those that have stayed with you before.
As for vacation or holiday guests, you could use the data you have in a similar way to target given locations especially if you see a cluster of interested parties coming from one area.
You may want to map all of your customers data and then design events at your hotel that would interest parties from a given location.
This all might sound very straight forward, and it is, it is about helping your team do more with the data you already have and visualising whereas a business you are most effective and where your customers actually are.
Now, if we consider Geotargeting and online commerce or ecommerce, then the need for location is similar but a little different as you are not driving traffic to your venue but using Geotargeting to share relevant product by location.
We all know the eTailing or online shopping continues to grow and take market share in product commerce but using data to be smart can influence a buyer’s decision.
Let’s imagine for a moment that you have a stock of Snow boots to sell via your online store, do you target all customers or do you analyse by location, add national weather data and focus on customers that live in potentially colder climates.
Maybe it is Surf gear or beach wear, your inner-city customers might not want a surf board, but those living by the coast may appreciate the deal you have.
With modern commerce, it really all comes down to data, community and how customers are engaged with your brand, geotargeting will help you help your customers with a better buying experience, because you are sharing relatable product by location.
Relevance of what your customers want is key to your success, there is no point me banging on about the technology, with cloud computing everything that is possible is now possible for your business, the real question is do you want to make better use of your data to understand your market share, by location.
Yes there is a huge amount of chatter right now about social, and marketing and what is best, but all these things are underpinned by the community you want to build for your brand and the data you use to do it. If you know what product or service is popular and where it is popular then you have a great starting point for growth.
Yes, data is so important, but it is only one jigsaw piece of your business puzzle, the power of location and data and understanding market comes from understanding all the data you have, what a customer looks like and then analytics help you connect the dots, some might call this DATA MANAGEMENT but here at Mapsimise we like to think of it as Location Analytics using your data to define what you are really good at
My view of the world right now, is that the concept of what was once called “Big Data” is now moving into the mainstream and every type of business can make better use of what information they already have, especially when it comes to understanding customer, product and services by location, along with gaining and needing location intelligence for your business activity.
Sure, there are lots of buzz words and acronyms, but the is normal for tech, right. Being someone who regularly blogs and shares podcasts, I have to say that is not our focus, we are not here to sell the tech or confuse. Our approach is simple we aim to help your business understand your data.
But the objective for business has always been the same, create happy customers through great community and build more sales and retain your customers by understand their needs.
Location is a key part of the WHERE when it comes to your business analytics, so all I can say in closing is
Do you want to know what your market share is, by location?
This Podcast was brought you to by Mapsimise.com, a data platform that enables you to understand location in your business.
About Alistair Dickinson
Alistair has been working in the technology sector for the past 23 years, mainly around developing software solutions and now being the CEO and Founder of Mapsimise.
If you want to connect with him, his profile is in the comments below
About Mapsimise.com
Mapsimise is a geospatial data platform for understanding and connecting business data by location, from heat maps to clustering, to shape filters and loading data, giving businesses like yours, and of all sizes the ability to understand data by location and gain location intelligence.
