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.

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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.

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Location Intelligence Solutions Optimize Infrastructure Investments

By: Adriana Noton - March 7th, 2011  Filed under: postal code map, Technology Add Comment

The goal of any enterprise must be to address and resolve the following operational issues: improve government regulatory compliance, generate a high return on investment, improve customer satisfaction, determine and streamline provisioning requirements, and optimize infrastructure investments. Today, in order to stay competitive, businesses must find effective solutions to optimizing their infrastructure investments. Fortunately, advancements in business intelligence technological solutions have resulted in effective solutions to such business issues. Developments in location intelligence solutions now enables enterprise to optimize networks and manage their assets with rich, relevant, and dependable next generation content. Location Content Cartridges (LCC) are advanced solutions that are designed to address specific business infrastructure investment needs.

Location Content Cartridges (LCC) provides the next generation content for optimizing infrastructure investments and other operational functions such as the provisioning of services. It allows businesses to improve customer satisfaction by administrating accurate pre-sale qualifications and decreasing the service interval. This gives enterprise the ability to plan and track millions of dollars worth of infrastructure and assets. By doing so, they are able to maximize market penetration while controlling network investments. Engineers will be able to identify current infrastructure locations, evaluate how to best service current customers, and analyze data to determine the best markets to construct new infrastructure.

LCC provides rich. applicable, and dependable content that has been specifically configured for the client’s specific industry’s product or service lines. As well, a business will benefit from the addition of new content layers. The result is more precise location information. Enterprise will be able to identify the rate of change and customer opportunities to support growth in new markets. For enterprise involved in leveraging the next generation content for planning and design, risk analysis, infrastructure analysis, and regulatory compliance, they will benefit from considerable cost savings and increased revenue when using LCC.

LCC solutions can be easily integrated into enterprise IT environments and it is designed to boost existing business work-flow performance. Businesses will boost customer acquisition more efficiently, manage risk effectively, and gain a competitive edge. Specifically designed to address a businesses’ unique administration challenges, Location Content Cartridges (LCC) combines numerous core geospatial solutions with new content making it the right choice to help businesses resolve their most urgent operational issues.

Today, businesses have a wide range of business location intelligence solutions available to help them grow their business. With technology becoming such a vital part of running a successful enterprise, it is essential that a business harness the power of innovative business solutions in order to stay competitive. With so many businesses now having the ability to expand in all domestic regions and even internationally, location solutions is an important business investment. Location solutions enables a business to effectively optimize their infrastructure investments while saving money. Developments in location intelligence solutions such as Location Content Cartridges (LCC) now gives enterprise the ability to optimize networks and manage their assets with relevant, rich, dependable next generation content so they can make the decisions that will best benefit the company.

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The Future of Business Intelligence: Innovations in Location Intelligence

By: Adriana Noton - November 1st, 2010  Filed under: postal code map, spatial analysis Add Comment

In the coming years, many business analysts are predicting that Business Intelligence (BI) will play a central role in the success of a multitude of different types of businesses. This is due to the fact that more businesses are recognizing the benefits of spatial data analysis in making smarter business decisions. Employing business intelligence solutions provides such benefits as: identifying the location of targeted customers, understanding customers better, reaching targeted customers, optimizing business operations, managing revenue more efficiently, minimizing risks, and forecasting potential problems. Because of changing consumer lifestyles that now includes incorporating technology in their daily lives, the future and innovation of location intelligence is expected to focus on such technological innovations as the internet and mobile technology such as iphones. The result of utilizing location intelligence solutions in a world where technology is now a part of nearly everybody’s life is greatly improved business performance.

Businesses use location intelligence solutions to gather, organize, and analyze consumer data through the use of geographic patterns and relationships. Because consumer trends are shifting to using such technology as the internet, iPhones, etc, on a daily basis, business intelligence teams must now harness the opportunities this technology has created in order to improve their marketing strategies and reach their targeted market. In addition, the changing economic environment has resulted in diminished marketing budgets which have made the development effective and successful marketing strategies even more vital.

Today the internet has created a world wide market that does not have any geographical boundaries. For instance, it has been estimated that 1 billion people will access social networks by the year 2014 and most of the users will use a location based application. Businesses now have the ability to communicate directly with their targeted customers and meet their demands in order to gain a competitive edge. As well, marketers will be better able to identify current consumer trends and forecast future trends. It will also help them create and implement more effective business strategies that have a better chance of achieving success. A business will be able to better understand customer behavior, recognize and take advantage of unexpected opportunities, and predict problems before they occur.

Social computing, cloud computing, and mobile computing, are now a part of most people’s daily lives. Future innovations in location intelligence will allow companies to harness these technologies to develop effective strategies to reach their customers. For instance, taking advantage of consumer driven technological applications will involve incorporating such areas as marketing, product promotion, customer loyalty, point of purchase, etc., into these applications. As well, using Real-Time Business Intelligence to gain instant information will become essential to achieving success.

Because of the emergence of huge spatial data sources such as Google maps, more consumers are adopting location based applications such as iPhone Apps, businesses must now engage in innovative thinking to capitalize on the data. In the future, technological advancements will result in business intelligence undergoing a fundamental shift that will revolutionize the way business decisions are made. Businesses who do not embrace this shift will definitely be at a serious disadvantage when trying to succeed in such an intensely competitive world.

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Benefits of Spatial Location Intelligence Solutions

By: Adriana Noton - August 12th, 2010  Filed under: spatial analysis Add Comment

In a world where businesses have the ability to target customers in all areas within a country and even global regions, it has become essential to utilize technology to better identify business solutions and make better business decisions in regards to marketing, identifying current trends, reaching customers, and developing a complete awareness of potential problems and key relationships and patterns. The use of spatial location intelligence solutions has become vital in helping businesses achieve their goals.

The following outlines the benefits of utilizing spatial location intelligence solutions:

Real-Time Access to Information: Today, information gathering is essential to maintaining business success. Technological advancements have resulted in available information growing at a rapid rate. Spatial location intelligence allows businesses to gather a wide variety of data in various formats and put the information in a workable format that allows for easy access and understanding. Such format can include: digital displays, graphs, charts…etc.

Efficient Management of Spatial Data: Spatial location intelligence solutions provide businesses with the ability to manage data as needed. As well, company’s can integrate the data to make it relevant to their specific criteria for a particular region. This allows them more flexibility to better manage their data, visualize scenarios, solve problems, and make better business decisions.

Precision Search Queries: Utilizing spatial data allows for better representation of such features as transportation routes, buildings, water ways, retail locations, property lines, postal code boundaries, communication objects such as cell phone towers, and much more. As well, there is more precise location information for such features and objects as hospitals, bridges, street addresses, flood zones, earthquake zones, and residential and business addresses. It also allows for the identification of relationships of geographic features and objects in an area. Such formulas can be used to calculate driving times, proximities, travel distances, and more. The goal is to make more informed business decisions.

Real-world Applications: Spatial location intelligence solutions can be used in a wide variety of areas such as in Government for such tasks as economic development, public safety, health safety, homeland security, and land records. Key features include: managing geospatial information referenced by latitude/longitude, ensuring precision and accuracy, and supports space and time based searches. As well, such organizations as the Military, meteorology, and oceanography benefit from using spatial location intelligence solutions. For businesses, they can analyze demographic data to find regions to sell their products or services. Data collected using the Geographic Information System will help businesses acquire a better market picture of a particular market region much faster and easier.

There are numerous benefits to utilizing spatial location intelligence solutions. Businesses are able to successfully visualize and map analyzed data to identify current shopping trends, consumer lifestyle trends, changing demographics, specific geographical objects and features, to help them better understand their business markets in order to boost productivity, improve business performance, increase profitability, and generate revenue. The most important benefit of using spatial location intelligence solutions is to help businesses leverage their data to make better businesses decisions, as well as improving their bottom line.

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