11 Of The Most Important Reasons To Use Location Insights When Planning Business Expansion

Location is vital to every business’s success, be it an online store or on-site. Location analytics helps enterprises choose the best place for their business. They will know where their customers are and how to make themselves available to meet their needs.

The critical benefits of location analytics are why it’s growing rapidly. Statistics show that the global location analytics market size is projected to grow from USD 15.76 billion in 2022 to USD 43.97 billion by 2029.

If you are about to expand your business and looking for the best location to move to, using location analytics is a great option. It will help you decide the most suitable place your business needs to attract customers and grow. 

This article considers the eleven most critical reasons why location insights are a must for successful business expansion planning. Let’s begin. 

What is location analytics?

Location analytics is the insight gained from a business data’s location or geographic component. It is a visual method of interpreting and evaluating the data with a geographical information system. 

Location analytics provide real-time insights about your customers’ location, preferences, and interests. Hence, they are useful for all business types, including retail stores, courier and postal services, etc.

Top reasons to use location insights when planning business attention

Using location insights to grow your business offers immense advantages. Here are the most crucial reasons to adopt location insights for your business. 

1. Location insights answer meaningful questions

When opening a new location for your business, some of the questions you may have to answer include: 

  • Where is the best place to expand my business? 
  • What are the shopping habits of the people living in this new location? 
  • Who are the existing competitors, and where are they located?

Location analytics will supply the right questions to these answers. Empowered with this data, you can conduct a successful retail mapping process to select the best location, know more about your customers, and perform a successful competitor analysis. 

2. It helps to determine your market size 

Calculating your market size is essential for business expansion, especially if you are opening your store in a new location. It allows you to gauge the number of people likely to patronise you at a new site. You will also know the number of sales and profit you’ll make within a specific period, allowing you to visualise the profitability of your business at a location. 

With retail mapping software, you can access actionable location analytics that help you to calculate your market size and visualise your business’s success before you expand to a new place. Doing this lets you decide if launching your business in a new location or tapping into a new market is profitable.

 If it’s not going to generate the revenue you want or contribute to the company’s growth, you can restrategise early, preventing disappointment and resource wastage. 

3. Location insights promote strategic analysis 

A practical business strategy is a must-have for a successful business expansion. You need an effective plan to know where, when, and how to expand your business. Location intelligence gives you the data you need to gain deep insight into the possible outcomes of your marketing efforts. This way, you can take proactive steps to prevent impending setbacks and plan adequately for success. 

With location intelligence, you’ll identify new opportunities in the market and equip your business with the required resources and strategy to harness them. You will also know the pitfalls to avoid and the right communication and marketing approach to adopt for the best results. 

4. It enhances targeted marketing 

To grow your business successfully, you must clearly know who your target audience is and how to reach them. Focusing on the general market won’t allow you to channel your efforts to the right places to achieve the expected outcome. 

However, location insights reveal your audience’s demographics, so you can know precisely where they are and focus on that area. Also, you will learn other specific details about them, such as their shopping habits and interests, enabling you to structure your marketing according to their location and preferences. 

5. Location insights help you understand your customer journey 

Post-it notesUnderstanding your customers’ purchase process helps you improve their experiences and make informed business decisions when expanding your business. 

You can link your customers’ buying habits to their location. For example, you will discover why specific periods are peak hours and why sales decline at a particular time, whether due to traffic, customers’ schedules, preferences, or other factors. 

Additionally, you can connect their online behaviour to physical habits. You will know which customer walked into the store after viewing an ad online or engaging on your social media platform.

This is because you will receive specific real-time details like when a customer interacts with your business on their smartphone and when that smartphone is close to your physical store. Essentially, location intelligence can help you map out your customer’s journey. It allows you to predict your customers’ actions and react proactively for an exceptional experience. 

6. It amplifies business intelligence 

Location insights enhance your business intelligence by providing the data required to complement your business data. You will receive heat maps of urban density and customers’ preferred routes and identify the most sought-after neighbourhoods with location data. This allows you to visualise and maximise business opportunities. You can also avoid common mistakes and prevent possible disasters.

Considering the details provided by location analytics can help you develop an excellent business strategy when expanding your business. 

7. Location insights improve retargeting 

Effective retargeting increases your sales and grows a consistent customer base. When a customer shows interest in your product or service but doesn’t patronise you immediately, retargeting allows you to remind and re-advertise to them to facilitate their decision-making process.  

Location analytics provides real-time geolocation details, notifying you of your customers’ activities. So, you will know when a customer walks into your competitors’ store or searches for similar products or services elsewhere. These insights allow you to restrategise your marketing efforts to incite customers to buy. For example, you can provide exciting offers, bring the products back to their feed, or inform them about your business’s unique benefits. 

Besides increasing your sales and retaining customers, this approach also gives you a competitive edge. You will be a step ahead of your competitors and ensure you don’t lose your customers to them. 

8. It promotes relevant marketing 

Customers are resisting intrusive marketing now more than ever. 91% of customers surveyed said they find ads more intrusive than two years ago and up to 419 million people downloaded ad-blocking apps. This shows buyers are becoming more resistant to ads by the minute because they find the ads irrelevant. 77% of customers say they would rather filter than block ads. 

Real-time location analytics provides relevant customer insights to offer helpful product and service recommendations to your customers’ needs. For instance, since you know where your customers live, you can make suggestions related to their location. You will also run campaigns with their preferences, interests, and lifestyle in mind, making your ads more relevant. This increases your sales and promotes customer satisfaction, producing exceptional results from your marketing efforts. 

9. Location insights help you take proactive business decisions 

Location analytics doesn’t supply real-time data only; it also provides actionable information about the future. So, using location insights when planning to expand your business won’t show only what’s trending in the locations, but also hints you on what’s likely to happen in the future. 

Will the population density remain the same? Will your product continue to be in demand? Will consumers’ spending habits change? Location intelligence answers these questions, enabling you to make proactive decisions that will benefit your business long-term. 

10. It supplies hyperlocal intelligence 

Location analytics capture everything about your customers’ location and you can turn this data into heat maps, enabling compelling visualisations. This improves collaboration as you can share location insights with analysts, developers, and the rest of the team in an engaging way.  

Additionally, since it updates all the details about consumers’ locations, you can have a comprehensive view of everything you need, allowing you to make most of the analytics provided. 

11. It provides real-world context 

Location analytics connect data to real-life situations, revealing how the insights connect to other data features. The context provided enriches analytics, allowing you to visualise scenarios and have a deeper understanding of your customers’ behaviour. So, rather than abstract data, it puts the data into context, enabling you to make decisions that are related to the data supplied.

Conclusion 

Expanding your business requires strategic planning that involves location analytics. Using location analytics will allow you to expand your business to where your customers are. You will also effectively understand their shopping habits, plan and target customers. 

Additionally, employing location analytics allows you to determine your market size and decide if a location is profitable, among other benefits. This article further explains why adopting location analytics will benefit your business expansion strategy.

Author bio Lydia Iseh

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