Businesses are in business to make a profit. They have a product or service to offer the public, government, or other businesses. Finding out who are your best customers, where they are located, their current purchases, and what new items they could buy are all important questions for a business to grow.
In a business, you have to market your products and services to bring awareness to the public, and then make the sales. Marketing and sales are two different components in a business, but both are important to success. If the Marketing department puts an ad on television to promote a new product, how does it know if the ad was successful? The number of sales made. Is just knowing that your ad is a success, a success? Or can it be even more successful?
What if you knew which segment of the population bought your product? Would where they lived, or how close they lived to your stores be even more informative? You could then better target your audience, making more sales with less effort. You could also target this same demographic in other cities across Canada and be more efficient with your marketing dollars.
GIS Is the Secret Weapon
Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are a tool that some businesses use to grow their customer base, by linking their marketing and sales databases via addresses and overlaying these locations on a computerized map. You see this already in Google Maps. If you type a query like “Vancouver Chinese Restaurants” in your Google Chrome browser you will get a street map with a series of pins showing the locations of Chinese restaurants in Vancouver. Zooming into the map you will see more Chinese restaurant locations showing up, as well as clusters of restaurants.
What does that tell you? It could be that these locations have many restaurants, or that there are surrounding neighbourhoods that like Chinese food. With this knowledge, where would you locate your new Chinese restaurant? Or you may have a store that sells Asian food supplies, like noodles and sauces. Wouldn’t you want to put your store near to these clusters of restaurants? The power of geography!
Using Your Customer Data
Let’s look a bit more into how the sales and marketing departments can work together, using GIS as the link between them to make them more efficient, effective, and profitable. Instead of using a database of restaurants, pet supply stores, etc. from Google, a business would have their own sales databases. The Marketing department may have an ad on television for a new product, or are running a time-limited sale on a product, e.g. 2 weeks. As there is a time stamp in the sales database, the sales team should be able to see who has been buying this product BEFORE the promotion, DURING the promotion, and AFTER the promotion.
For each of these 3 time periods, it would be beneficial to know where and what type of customer bought your product. Did you find NEW customers during the promotion period that now continued as a valued customer after the promotion ended? Where are they located? More strategic information you can use with your GIS maps.
Canadian Census Data Helps Too
You can use Census data in a GIS to help locate other clusters of similar clients across the city or in other cities. The Canadian government has a regular census, where they find out the demographics of neighbourhoods (broken down by Census areas as small as 400-700 people). If you overlay the Census areas on the sales datasets, you can identify the demographics of the Census areas that have the most pins.
Query the GIS to find all the Census areas that have the same, or similar, demographic information. Start target marketing these areas with flyers, newspaper ads, or other marketing methods. When these people start buying your products/services, your database should update, and new pins will pop up on your map. Your knowledge of your customers will grow as well as your profits.
You Can Do It with GIS Training by BCIT
If you want to do the analysis yourself you can purchase commercial GIS software, like ESRI’s ArcGIS, or download a free, open-source GIS, like QGIS. Your learning curve to become proficient in using these software may take a while, but you can do it. The BCIT GIS department offers online GIS training courses to help you learn how to use GIS to solve business problems. Or, you can hire one of our graduates to do the work for you; you become more profitable and able to make better decisions faster than your competitors. Whether you take it on yourself, or work with us, GIS can help grow your business.