Five Critical Benefits of Location Intelligence for Retailers

Are you using the power of geoinformation in your business?

Geography matters, especially in the modern hyper-connected world where the rise of ecommerce means physical stores must not only offer desirable products of value for a fair price, but must also provide high levels of customer service, and somehow continuously be crafting a bigger and better in-store experience for their customers than their competitors.

Meanwhile customers increasingly expect convenience, value and efficiency when using their time to visit physical stores instead of shopping online. They are savvier than ever before about shopping and competition for their attention and shopping dollars is fierce. 

Good news!

There is a tool set you can use to gain an edge in the highly competitive retail world! 

Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and location intelligence data software can produce highly visual, highly useful data driven maps of a region, city, neighborhood, market or even inside a store itself, filled with information and insights that can enable retailers to gain an immediately valuable and highly competitive advantage in their marketplaces.

Placing the business data you probably already collect on a map and augmenting it with other publicly and privately available data is not only key to thoroughly understanding and visualizing your market, but also capitalizing on it. 

Let’s take a closer look at five ways GIS mapping benefits retailers:

1. Selecting Your Location

The wrong location can greatly impact your business’s success, no matter how compelling, useful and valuable your product or service might be. 

GIS mapping and location intelligence can help retailers determine what type of site is right for their store to better optimize the choice of location for maximized potential.

Mapping and evaluating for retail site selection involves considering many factors that will help drive sales, from consumer demand and traffic patterns to local populations and much more. 

A retail market mapping tool gives retailers the power to store, quantify, visualize, and manage site data in order to avoid a potentially poor location.

2. Identify Your Competition

Data is knowledge and knowledge is power. GIS software provides access to competitive information in a concise and useful visual map based format. 

With GIS, retailers can understand exactly where competitors are in relation to their own facilities and what local factors in that specific area are affecting the outcomes of the locations.

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Competition mapping with GIS moves beyond the spreadsheet and offers a visual representation of nearby competitors, the products and services they offer, their hours of operation, marketing tactics, and in many cases, so much more.

GIS gives retailers a clear, visual understanding of what is happening in their market, providing insights that can drive product development, promotions, and customer loyalty in the face of ever increasing competition. 

3. Analyze Customer Demographics

To make the most of GIS mapping capabilities, retailers first need basic customer information, such as name, address, postal code, and products purchased. Most retailers collect at least some or all of this information already in the course of every day business. 

Understanding your customers and their shopping decisions is crucial to increasing profitability and launching new strategies. 

Retailers can link this commonly collected data to geographic information using GIS mapping. Not only will you be able to draw insights from location-based demographic data, but also plot profitable customer groups and learn more about lifestyle behaviors.

4. Manage Delivery Routes & Field Personnel

A powerful tool for optimizing fleet management, deliveries and field personnel such as sales reps, service techs or inventory management staff, GIS can help optimize schedule requests, arrival and departure times, customer site visits, fuel use, routes and route efficiencies and many other facets of supply chain management. 

Bring complex data to life with mapping analysis, and connect the dots for shipping, delivery and service based field processes.

5. Launch Targeted Marketing Campaigns

Retailers who leverage GIS can generate multi-dimensional representations and views of customer preferences, dislikes and purchasing trends. 

Analyzing patterns in your market is an essential step in communicating with customers through effective marketing. 

Using geospatial analytics in retail allows you to plan effective and accurate marketing personas and refine strategies, better target with new and social media audiences, and launch much more effective and optimized direct mail campaigns.

Mapping software reveals a world of vital information to retailers, from demographic profiles to nearby competitors, and more. 

By visualizing information with GIS mapping, retailers can better interpret data, improve decision making, and enhance communications. Learn more about GIS mapping and how you can leverage it for your own business.

Let’s have a conversation

We would love to learn about your business goals and hurdles and share some insights and pointers we’ve learned along the way about GIS options, tools and best practices. Let us show you some of the ways we’ve helped other companies get where they want to go, and chat about what we can achieve together for your company, with no obligation required.

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