Using Data To Improve Your Marketing – Mapping
Using Data and Research to know WHERE Your Customers Are
You have heard the expression “Location, location, location.” Real estate agents say that when they are trying to get a good selling price for a home. Some of the same goes for many businesses. Knowning where your customers can help you target them better.
So how well do you know where your customers, and more importantly, your potential customers are?
By taking some relevant data points and putting them in a mapping program, you can get a good look at where you should be targeting your marketing efforts.
For example, let’s say you are in the remodeling business, and you want to target higher income areas where homes are older and need work. You want to put up billboards, or do direct mail, or yard signs or just go door to door. But where do you start? By plugging data into a mapping program like Maptitude, you can get a picture of where you need to focus.
Putting It Into Practic – Mapping Your Data
In the image below, the shaded areas represent where household incomes are $150,000 or more, and are split into five quadrants (20% in each quadrant). The orange indicates the areas on the map that have the top 20% of homes with income more than $150,000. The darker blue areas are the next 20%. These two areas make up the top 40% of your target area, and you want to focus on them first.
You also want to find where the older homes are. That’s where the pie chart comes in. The orange in the pie chard are homes built in the 1970s. The blue are homes built in the 1980s. White are home built in the 1990s. Also, the bigger the size of the pie, the more homes that are in that area.
So looking at this map, you want to target areas that have an orange background, a big pie and homes built in the 1970s and 1980s.
Doing mapping data analysis like this can be used on a local, regional, or national level. You can also use existing data to see where your sales are coming from, and can focus on certain locations, or if you see a gap where there aren’t any sales, develop a plan to attack that.