The New Marketing Geography – Six-Digit Postal Code Boundaries

By: Adriana Noton - May 9th, 2011  Filed under: Address Management, postal code map, spatial analysis Add Comment

Location intelligence has become an essential tool to helping businesses expand and grow their markets. Making use of marketing analytics to drive their business activities has become a standard practice for most enterprise. Today, using the new marketing geography – Six-Digit Postal CodeOM boundaries, acquired through location intelligence solutions, businesses can achieve optimum levels in trade area delineation, market segmentation and serviceability.

There are approximately 818,000 active postal codes (FSALDU) for residences and businesses in
Canada. In the past, experts promoted the use of government administration boundaries as the ideal geographic unit for marketing activities. Only recently, a six digit postal code geographic boundary fabric has been created that covers all urban and rural areas across Canada.

Postal code boundaries are typically smaller geographic units representing smaller clusters of households and individuals. The maintenance and updating of geographies is also significantly different. Census geography is determined for the primary purpose of collecting descriptive statistics regarding the populations within their boundaries. Businesses with GIS software, access to vector street data that is ascribed with address verification ranges, and customer data that has been address-referenced, have the ability to delineate and study the trade areas where the majority of their customers are located which includes where they live and work. Companies can also focus direct mail advertising campaigns on their own trade areas, or their competitors’. Furthermore, GIS can be used to analyze the socio-economic characteristics of the population within trade areas, enabling businesses to make sure that the products and services they offer meet the needs and preferences of target populations.

Data acquired from location intelligence solutions that provide a more granular and present view of the market place provides the following business benefits:

• The business is able to locate higher value customers that have higher purchase value and purchase frequency.

• The ability to achieve higher sales conversion rates by more accurately targeting marketing activity to specific customer profiles.

• The business is able to reduce marketing campaign costs, from analytics through to distribution.

Six-Digit Postal CodeOM boundaries data provides increased precision to the marketing professional. As well, increased granularity in marketing geography allows marketing researchers to identify more subtle variation in geodemographic variables. This new capability enables business benefits directly associated to the use of six digit postal code boundaries when driving marketing analytics where location is a relevant consideration.

Postal addresses are now used for more than just sending mail. Businesses now have the ability to use location intelligence solutions to identify key information from postal code data to better identify and develop markets and determine potential risks so that they can effectively grow their business. Location intelligence solutions such as Postal Code mapping software will have the most comprehensive and detailed collection of Canadian postal geography products that provide a robust marketing analytics and distribution data solution, with unmatched neighbourhood level precision. By using Six-Digit Postal CodeOM boundaries as the new marketing geography acquired through location intelligence solutions, businesses can now achieve the most favourable levels of performance in trade area delineation, market segmentation and serviceability.

Tags: , , , ,

Transforming Location Intelligence Into Profit

By: Adriana Noton - May 9th, 2011  Filed under: Location Intelligence, spatial analysis, Technology Add Comment

More businesses are now realizing that technology is only as good as the content and quality of the data that is being managed. Location intelligence provides the capability to organize and understand convoluted processes through the use of geographic relationships. At an enterprise level, Location Intelligence has the capacity to optimize business processes to improve profitability and competitiveness. Location intelligence helps businesses use the principles of location to organize, reason, plan, and problem solve. The degree of information is enriched by the successful integration into a process that results in better business decision making. Transforming location intelligence into profit is about transforming business processes to create more enterprise opportunities.

The business use of location intelligence can be divided into the following three sub-categories that are designed to improve profitability.

Consumer Applications: These are enterprise applications that build loyalty among customers and influence purchasing behaviors. For example, retailers can execute store-specific promotions with more accuracy or use location intelligence to enhance loyalty program services.

Customer Service: Applications that facilitate customer service and self-service to improve the overall
customer experience. For example, a government agency can more efficiently measure service levels or
plan for the distribution of services that are in many cases dependent on variables that change over
space, such as household income or number of children.

Enterprise Decision Support: Enterprise applications that help create optimal business strategies where the outcome is improved profitability. For example, identifying common customers and determining how to offer services to achieve the greatest value.

To access all possible revenue opportunities through location intelligence, a location intelligence provider should be able to provide the following:

All Validated Addresses in a Market: Creating the capability to determine the exact households
in a serviceable market’

Mapping to the Property: Adding geo-targeted precision through geographic references to the
property parcel or roof-top levels for contemporary location intelligence applications.

Residential, Business and Unit Information: Illuminating residential and office buildings with
access to validated unit and floor information.

Address Management: Address validation, data cleansing, and data maintenance. The enterprise benefits from clean, current, and standardized address elements with geographically explicit references. verifying the existence of individual addresses by matching them against a master address database of functional addresses.

Mapping Addresses: Transforming addresses to embed explicit references of location. This
allows the enterprise to map customers and to understand the opportunities among business
assets, programs and competitive threats.

Standardizing Addresses: Ensures a common address structure, syntax, and nomenclature.
A corporate-wide level of standardization allows for more predictable levels of data quality
and system performance.

Merging customer information from a master address database provides complete viewing of all addressed dwellings. This allows for product penetration views, even into Multiple Dwelling Unit (MDU) buildings. Changes to customer product and service levels by building can now be measured to assess marketing, sales, and operational activities. Using location intelligence helps a business understand fundamental characteristics about customers, prospects, and their potential relationships to an enterprise’s revenue-generating operations. Location Intelligence has the capacity to optimize business processes to improve profitability and gain a competitive edge.

Tags: , , , ,

Succeeding In The Marketplace Using Business Management And Location Intelligence

By: Adriana Noton - April 19th, 2010  Filed under: coordinate systems, Local Search, Maps Add Comment

With any downturn in the economy businesses scramble to find better ways of conducting their enterprise. Some of the more effective ways include careful analysis of each work module required to accomplish the job. A careful annotation of what happens along the way from the manufactured product, transportation to the store, reception, stocking the shelves, marketing the product and sales to customers and allows for a systematic review of the business. Careful application of business management and location intelligence may save a struggling business.

With profit in mind anything that can be done to reduce time handling or price increases the bottom line. While this may appear obvious is a complex task especially with products that require considerable handling between the market and the store will require special storage or are expensive. Just-in-time manufacturing reduced overhead for companies by preventing stocking store parts this concept applies to retail market as well.

It is important to carefully document everything that happens to the product no matter how innocuous it may appear. Frequently flowcharts are drawn which allow for a step-by-step visual representation of the overall process. Having just visual picture allows the manager and employees to document problems or hold ups within the steps. Just drawing a flowchart of the incremental pathway will help in identifying unnecessary steps or steps that could be combined. Focusing on the most difficult areas will allow for the greatest improvement in the system.

As one digs deeper into the process as it becomes clear that each step is in some way dependent on the step before it and so it is helpful to add an element of time into each module. I carefully analyzing the time management of the system one can identify a critical path that is the sequence of the sub-processes which cannot be done in parallel but must be done in series such that any delay increases the overall system timing.

Added years to gain the greatest successes include their employees in the analysis of the work. Those individuals closest to the work that once were doing a hands-on daily activities are a gold mine of ideas on how to do it better. A smart manager learns to harness these ideas and doesn’t cost money go against policy or cause a safety concern should try the ideas even if he’s not sure it will work.

Prior what type of management approach one chooses to employ to gain efficiency one must eliminate either steps resources or manpower but there is increasing attention being given to a new concept. This is a new notion that tries to leverage the data within processes that link the system by location. Including a geographic component in the analysis of product provision is another way to increase efficiency.

This new concept is not as complicated as it may sound. The idea of including a component of location to the analysis of which products to sell place on special or insure to remain in stock makes sense once it has been added to the analysis. By harvesting the data of sales patterns in multiple locations businesses can focus on providing the locally demanded products in the areas with greatest turnover. This provides a tremendous efficiency by reducing warehousing and allows for greater sales.

Tough times drive management to make difficult decisions. These decisions may even include reduction of employees which contrary to employee believes is not something management wants to do. It’s possible to use a combination of business management, postal code map, and location intelligence to increase profit and efficiency businesses are more likely to be able to retain employees and stay successful even in a down market.

Tags: , , ,