Thursday, January 26, 2012

Improve Your Marketing Campaigns With Spatial Data

By Grayson McElfrey


Using aspects of geography such as GIS data and spatial data can help a business in several different ways, and one of the greatest is with marketing. Marketing campaigns are a crucial part of any business to attract new customers and provide new offers to existing ones. A lot of the marketing process has traveled online in recent years, but traditional forms of marketing are still an integral part of the success of any business. The use of geocoding software to produce geospatial data helps a business pinpoint the exact locations of current and potential customers, in order to send more accurate marketing information. No business wants to market its products and services to people who don't want them, and using spatial data can help to minimize such occurrences.

With a geocoder and geospatial data, a business can basically gain on their competition by showing their message through several different platforms. Spatial data can help show which newspapers are more likely to reach your existing and future customers. Spatial data can tell you which billboards to advertise on so they're more likely to be seen by your potential customers. Spatial data can even help you to determine which radio stations you should advertise on to reach the demographic of a given area. You can even use geospatial data to decide which city buses to advertise on so you can be sure they'll make regular trips right through the neighborhoods of your target markets. Spatial data helps to uncover buying behaviors so you can refine your target audience based on location.

Aside from finding the right customers and providing them with the messages they want to hear, you can also save quite a bit of money by using geocoding software to produce GIS data. Direct mail can be a costly endeavor that typically yields a relatively low response rate. By using geospatial data, you can determine with greater accuracy, where response rates will be higher and only mail to those areas. This cuts down on production costs of the marketing pieces, as well as the mailing costs. And since the mailings are a lot more targeted, the influx of discarded 'junk mail' will also be lessened.

Keeping accurate and targeted customer files and databases is the primary benefit of using GIS data in a business. Spatial data management allows a company to have a deeper understanding of their customer base, so they can tailor marketing messages that have a much higher chance of striking a chord.

Basically, GIS data helps to take a lot of the guesswork out of the marketing process. Instead of sending out marketing material to a general area that may contain people in your target market, the process is much more exact. You can figure out who your customers are, where they are, what they like to buy, where they like to buy and how they prefer to buy. Once you know all of the information, you just have to reach them in a way that will speak to their wants and needs.




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