Have you ever thought of adopting a geomarketing strategy to give your sales, marketing, and communication activities a real boost? I’m about to reveal how a very small geomarketing analysis could radically change your company’s sales performance. Let’s first start with a definition:
Geomarketing is a marketing approach that uses spatially-related information to effectively and efficiently analyze and plan marketing activities related to strategy, sales, communication, distribution, and customer service. (Wikipedia)
The compound term (geo-marketing) is intended to emphasize the need to integrate two seemingly very distant subjects: geography and marketing.
Thinking spatially is the mood of this new strategic marketing approach, aimed at enhancing not only the spatial dimension right from the analysis phase but also its integration within the strategic business management process.
But where to start? Precisely from all the master data available from your company’s databases relating to your customers. Today, most of a company’s data is, in fact, spatial: think of how many addresses you could access.
However, customers with similar territorial characteristics may often have different purchasing behavior. Here then, emerges the importance of understanding where the consumer lives and matching it with other so-called geo-referenced data in order to improve the offer according to the needs of the consumer and the characteristics of the territory.
One can therefore understand the importance of starting with a good analysis of business data, so why not attend the Web Analytics Specialist Course for professional training in digital business strategy and analysis?
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But let’s look in detail at what marketing is and how to apply it to your business.
Geomarketing is not only a powerful magnifying glass on markets and development areas but becomes a concrete and fast way of acting that has the knowledge of the territory and customers as the key to success.
How did Geomarketing come about?
Let us take a brief step back in time. Geomarketing was born in the early 1990s, at the height of the economic crisis, with the development of computer systems capable of effectively and efficiently processing electronic cartography.
Objective: to increase and improve sales performance with the least possible waste of resources.
The peak of success came in 2011, the year in which networking tools developed on mobile technology and aimed at location-based marketing were launched on the market, as well as the geolocation-based web service Foursquare, a phenomenon already well-known in America with millions of accounts.
Having realized the importance of the territory variable in a business strategy, geomarketing comes into play to make decisions regarding the identification of existing and potential catchment areas more effectively.
What geographic marketing is for in 4 points
Geomarketing means providing a territorially detailed view of one’s business model, keeping in mind the variables in terms of the performance of a given territory.
In an increasingly social and global context, thinking locally becomes the tool with which to distinguish oneself from the competition, make one’s offer unique and inimitable, and finally gain the loyalty of one’s consumers in the most original way.
So how does a geomarketing strategy help companies?
- Creating profiles of actual and potential customers;
- Identifying the competition
- Optimizing sales routes
- Evaluating new business opportunities.
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Why perform Geomarketing?
If you want to set up a successful marketing campaign, be it the opening of a franchise location of a company in a specific area or periodic promotional activities, there are several questions you will have to answer.
To help you with this analysis, there are several software packages that can easily visualize all the data you need to generate the reports you need to analyze in order to set up your marketing strategy.
- Who is my buyer persona?
- Where does my consumer reside?
- Where does he work?
- What does it buy, and how much does it weigh?
- Where do you spend your free time?
- Where do my competitors operate?
These are all key elements of geographic marketing to make the most of market analysis and optimize sales performance and results.
For a successful business strategy, knowing the spatial behavior of a potential user (what they consume, where they consume it, and how often) can make all the difference.
In the decision-making process of a business plan, the analysis of all spatial variables is key. You will see that defining the spaces and boundaries within which to act in a more targeted manner will help you to sharply reduce the margin of error in your campaign, even doubling your chances of success.
By adopting a geo-centered marketing approach, even the simplest local marketing activities, such as advertising your business on Google locally or using offline tools such as leafleting, billposting, door-to-door and direct mailing, become more profitable.
With additional knowledge of corporate digitization,
you can maximize the potential of your company.
Geointelligence and geo-localized marketing
If marketing is the approach and the discipline, GeoIntelligence and Geographic Information System (GIS), software that exploits technology to receive, store, process, cross-reference, manage and represent geographic data on advanced maps, are the tools.
In order to do geomarketing, it is necessary to have a specific computer tool belonging to the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) category that can associate information with maps and manage this combination of cartography and data, acquiring, storing, extracting, transforming, and visualizing spatial data in the real world (Value Lab)
The Geomarketing study usually consists of a few basic operations:
- Identify and analyze the area on an interactive map;
- Visualise competitors;
- Compare the data released with tables and graphs;
- Prepare the report for analysis;
- Estimate sales by identifying buyer personas and analyzing competitors’ strategies;
Clearly, to get a new business off the ground, the choice of location can only be dictated by a more than targeted strategy.
In the analysis phase, a more in-depth monitoring of your territory of action will help you to better define the impact of the new opening of a point of sale, or any other commercial establishment, in a given territory and to identify the most suitable location. Whether it is a corner, a flagship shop, an outlet, or a shop in a shopping center, it is clear that there are a number of elements that you cannot ignore:
- market segmentation,
- flow of passers-by,
- access routes to the location,
- presence of mobile traffic.
How to use mapping systems
The purpose of an approach such as geomarketing is to make decisions and activities in strategy, communication, sales, distribution, and customer service more effective and efficient. One of the main objectives of geomarketing is precisely site evaluation, i.e., the evaluation of the territory from a strategic perspective.
To achieve this goal, today, there are Geomarketing Intelligence services that can help you better position your business in the territory. Thanks to these digital mapping systems of your potential and/or already established business, in fact, you can:
- identify the best location for your shop or agency in relation to market demand and competition in that particular territory, be it a district, a city, or a province;
- discover the consumer journey and purchasing behavior of each market segment;
- analyzing locations, estimating the potential of a geographical area, to find the best sites that match your parameters, including streets and buildings;
- identify and geographically define current and potential customers and competitors;
- optimize the performance and territorial presence of its network of sales outlets;
- define sales targets per agent or per area;
- optimize commercial actions and the sales network and potential market presence;
- define the best strategy for expanding your network
- planning more targeted advertising campaigns and promotional actions;
- post-campaign evaluate commercial performance (turnover per geographical area and agent).
In a word, it is about optimizing and localizing all your business actions. But it doesn’t end there! For even more advanced monitoring of the territory and, consequently, of the behavior of your buyer personas, you will even be able to know which urban areas and at which periods and times the greatest flows of demand will be concentrated or transit. All this will undoubtedly make the construction of your territorial communication campaign easier, helping you to better target your target audience and subsequently conquer them with the offer best suited to their needs. I recommend, in this regard, taking a course in territorial marketing to develop analytical skills and a strategic vision of the activities to be implemented.
How to geolocalize
How to do Geomarketing? By means of databases, cartographic maps, sophisticated geolocalisation software, and statistical models of spatial analysis, geomarketing makes it possible to know and measure the potential reality of a territory, carefully evaluating the necessary actions to put in place. In order to be able to read and interpret all this data, it goes without saying that marketing and statistical skills are required to do geomarketing.
But that’s not all! Today, there are many software packages that allow one to know the economic and demographic data characterizing an area. This, however, is usually not enough: those who intend to invest in a given area need to have a strategic advantage over their competitors in order to market themselves profitably. At this point, through the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and statistics software, all that is needed is to integrate the data from one’s own company records with the information made available by digital cartography so as to have a map representation of our data of geographic origin and to be able to better evaluate it according to business needs.
By combining geomarketing with inbound marketing,
you can effectively grow your business.
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How to use Geomarketing for Market Research
With the translation of maps into digital form, it is, in fact, possible not only to visualize market and sales data on maps but also to capture, “zoom in”, enlarge and modify the data on a map as required. In short, using a computer, a tablet, or a smartphone in a few clicks, one can have a whole series of data needed to evaluate a given basin: the composition of the population living there, consumption, loyalty cards, competitors present, and much more. Thanks to these technological tools, geomarketing today is able to answer many more questions:
- where can I find new customers?
- how can I contact them effectively?
- to open up new markets, which countries should I focus on?
- is there a potential market that I don’t know about yet?
The added value of geomarketing lies precisely in the possibility of assessing possible business scenarios in advance. In order to assess all these aspects, geomarketing, unlike other analysis tools, enables the simultaneous representation and analysis of all these phenomena in a single map. Through the use of digital cartographic maps, geomarketing is thus able to provide you not only with a more complete view of your potential market but also of the one in which you are already operating because it is able to highlight the potential of each individual area taken into analysis and possibly evaluate win-back or enhancement actions.
Faced with the same geomarketing representation, one can make different decisions according to one’s business objective. In fact, all operational marketing activities can benefit from the use of the geographical dimension in decisions on:
- differentiated prices by zones
- choice of distribution channel
- promotional and direct marketing initiatives
Google My Business
Today, there are several tools that Google makes available to do geomarketing and to be able to place lists of outlets on a geographical map. One of these is Spreadsheet Mapper, a spreadsheet that is more advanced than the simple Excel file and with which one can customize the spatial variables one wishes to examine.
In addition, for new businesses, cloud-based GIS data and services are becoming more popular to facilitate the dissemination and sharing of geographic information via the web and mobile devices.
In a context where the new target group to be reached is becoming increasingly geo-localized, it is therefore of paramount importance for a business to be present on Google Maps – all you have to do is use Google My Business.
Conclusions
After all this information, you may be wondering how Digital Coach can help you with your Geomarketing strategy. Identify the right customer profile for your business with Digital Coach’s Digital Strategy Course or request a free consultation to understand how to apply Geomarketing to your business.
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