Need to find which data are really relevant to monitor your marketing and sales actions? Trying to gain better accuracy with which to direct these campaigns? Did you know that an estimated 75 percent of all business data contains a geographic component? By taking the location dimension into account when analyzing strategic CRM, tactical marketing and sales data you can get the maximum out of your data. Leveraging location-based data by geographically plotting relationships, trends, dependencies, and patterns on a map, turns your data into powerful information to solve business problems. Location Intelligence can help convert location from a challenge to a competitive advantage
Location Intelligence: It's all about Location and Data
Location Intelligence is the combination of business intelligence and geo-spatial data combined with cartographic tools to better understand the geographical context and the location-based relationships that lie within data. "Location"; relates to tagging and storing pieces of raw data with their specific location (in some instances this may also include the time dimension as well). "Intelligence" describes the process of accessing, analyzing and synthesizing data, converting this into knowledge or intelligence and then converting the learning into appropriate business actions. The new breed of Location Intelligence software is designed to connect and access all the important BI and operational data stores (CRM, SCM, ERP, etc.) combined with rich spatial and cartographic capabilities. On top of the integrated data environment sits a powerful set of enhanced tools and capabilities enabling new and improved data analytics techniques such a Clustering, Heat Maps, Time Sliders (Longitudinal Analytics), User Managed Thematic tools and Iconography.
These powerful new software platforms enable marketers to move from analysis and insight to actionable outcomes more quickly.Location is a central factor in business. A number of recent studies suggest that between 70-85% of a typical large enterprise's data is location identifiable. The location identifier can be an address, a sales territory, a delivery route, an administrative boundary, a customer's address, a store's location, the competitor's store locations, location of installed products or delivery of services or even determining the quickest (or less fuel-consuming) route between the warehouse and the delivery point. Location awareness is beneficial for business performance management, and location analytics can make all the difference in gaining better insights about customers. Today there are many well-documented use cases proving the business value of deploying a Location Intelligence solution. These uses cases leverage Location Intelligence solutions connected directly to enterprise applications, mapping large-scale datasets and applying spatial processing. With that solution architecture, the ROI can be well defined and proven across operational departments, large Business Units or even company-wide
How Location Intelligence can play a Major Role in your Marketing Strategy
Location Intelligence turns data about customers and marketing operations into knowledge that provides greater insight to enhance operational performance. By implementing location analytics companies can more quickly go from diagnostics to action, gain a competitive advantage, and obtain tangible results, such as:
1. Monitor store performance
2. Identify underperforming sales territories
3. Improve pricing strategy
4. Enhance direct marketing campaigns and advertising campaigns
5. Improve sales territory management
6. Analyze sales performance
7. Increase in the retention rate for reward and loyalty program card holders
8. Identify potential markets and define new trade areas for new stores
Location Intelligence empowers companies by providing deeper insight and understanding the outcomes of prior actions and the impacts to performance metrics. Location Intelligence users benefit from improved information to take action involving networks, distribution channels, and customer-bases, and maximize marketing decisions by answering questions such as:
- Where are my customers, distributors, and prospects located?
- Where are the gaps in my sales coverage?
- Is my distribution channel adapted to my customers' needs?
- Where are the potential areas to establish new points-of-sale?
- Where should the next marketing campaign be targeted?
- What are the risks in this given area?
- Where are the cross-selling opportunities?
Let's take an example. A beverage company wants to optimize its sales force efficiency and increase its sales. They are targeting 1 million potential customers (restaurants and bars) within the US territory and their sales force consists of 500 sales reps. Given these numbers, that means each sales rep has to visit 2000 customers, or 8-10 visits every working day. The sale productivity solution resides in optimizing territories, territory coverage models and maximizing route planning to visit the most important, most profitable customers or prospects first. Because Location Intelligence enables a better understanding of the geographical context and the location-based relationships that lie within CRM data, more and more businesses turn to these types of solutions to enhance trade area analysis, leverage predictive analytics modeling outcomes into actual marketing and sales planning or tactical marketing campaigns and lead generation.
Location Intelligence solutions can be integrated into all facets of your company, especially marketing, sales, distribution, and logistics. Your experts in marketing studies, site acquisition, marketing and communication, sales management and sales operations, finance, store operations, merchandising or store managers will benefit from a Location Intelligence solution to solve complex location-dependent business problems
