Why Could Location Analytics Become a Key Player on the Retail Scene?
Increasing sales, finding new customers and expanding to new locations are the top three most common priorities of any retail business. All these objectives are deeply connected with location: Everything that matters for a business happens somewhere, and using Location Analytics tools, companies are able to take advantage of the existing data in a spatial perspective to confidently overcome these goals.
The location of each sale and customer plays an important role in the process of shaping marketing and business decisions. By using the right mapping tools, businesses can make smarter data-driven moves in order to boost sales and increase their success.
According to Gary Sankary, the demographic profiles of consumer groups in specific cities and regions are an important source of data for business executives. This data can help steer business decisions in the right direction, especially when opening a new store or trying to reach a new market. Read on to learn how combining location data with business metrics can help executives tap into new and more profitable regions.
Location Analytics Help Identify The Best Location for a Store
Critical expansion decisions such as where to open or close a store can make or break retail businesses. According to Erply, in 2017, more than 8,000 retail stores in the US had to close. The pressure is growing among retailers to keep their business.
The use of location intelligence can be of great importance for businesses that are aiming to expand to a new location or make better use of their already existing assets.
For example, by analyzing data in a geographical perspective, companies can gain helpful insights into which locations are performing the best and which locations are costing them money. This can lead them to close the stores that are not performing well enough and use those assets to open a store at a new, more profitable location.
By using demographic data (residents, families, households) combined with business data (customers, stores, sales, visits) and external data (competitors, third party databases), retail owners can take a step ahead of their competitors and take their business to the right people at the right location.
The video below gives you a better insight on how you can identify the best location for your store.
Location Analytics allow retail owners to precisely determine where their new potential customers are situated based on location data combined with customers’ interests and preferences. Most importantly, executives can use location analytics tools that are so simple that they don’t need any type of external consulting or coding skills. This type of data analytics is positively impacting the way retail stores operate nowadays. This concept is also explained by Yoav Vilner at Hacker Noon.
A Major Role in Understanding Customer Behavior
Location analytics play an important role in pinpointing and understanding customer behavior. The Retail industry heavily relies on data that tells them how and where their customers relate with their stores. This happens both in the physical and the digital world. Thus, it is important to collect the critical data regarding customers’ behavior patterns. These patterns include everything from where your customers shop, why they choose certain stores and products, and what their most important interests are.
T-System’s infographic below shows the complete picture of how retail businesses can take advantage of their data.
Source: T-Systems
Let’s picture the following scenario – there is a new vegetarian restaurant opening in a frequented area of London. The dishes are delicious, there are many people passing by each day but do not go into the restaurant. Only after a few month the owner realizes that the people who live around eat mainly meat and fish dishes hence the unpopularity of the tasty vegetarian restaurant.
By knowing what their ideal customers care about, businesses can incorporate customer behavior data with demographic data and thus find suitable regions and locations for their stores.
Opening a new store without understanding customer behavior and linking it to their location is equivalent to shooting in the dark and hoping to hit the target. With the right location intelligence tools, businesses can fully control their decision-making processes and base them on insightful data and statistics, rather than just a guess.
Supporting Better Marketing Decisions
Last but not least, location analytics can help businesses improve their marketing decisions and create more data-driven campaigns. Nowadays, successful marketing is all about targeting the right people at the right place. Location intelligence tools allow exactly that – the ability to find potential customers who care about a specific product or service. The goal of such data tools is to derive critical insights out of customers’ location and purchase preferences.
Source: Business 2 Community
With the previously mentioned ability to understand customers’ behavior and their taste when it comes to specific products or industries, businesses can create better and more personalized marketing campaigns. With a personal approach to marketing, companies can build long-lasting relationships with groups of customers across different physical regions or even online.
Conclusion
The geospatial industry has advanced so much that even drones are being used to track shopper movement and contribute to a more efficient mapping. Satellite imagery, AI systems and drones might make location analytics sound way too complicated for a retail business executive.
However, businesses nowadays can easily access simple location analytics tools that will allow them to make smarter decisions without expensive consulting or investments. With data location tools that are simple and easy to use, business executives can easily compare critical insights and crunch the numbers to find the best location for their new store.
Other benefits of using location analytics solution include the ability to reach new demographic groups and expand the company’s impact, as well as thoroughly understand customer behavior. Understanding this data will not only lead to better location-related decisions but also better marketing campaigns and results.
Mapidea is one of the easiest location analytics solutions that aims to transform geospatial data into strategic insights and allow businesses to take advantage of every aspect of the customer information they collect. This kind of a SaaS based solution will open the door to new data-driven decision-making processes without any coding skills required. Request a demo here if you want to learn how your business can benefit from using location analytics.
