Location analytics is indeed important in business. In fact, in some instances, it may mean the difference between thriving or just surviving. Let's face it, marketing has always been important, but today it's more important than ever.
The Holy Grail of marketing is obviously achieving the greatest return on investment for the lowest marketing spend. In other words, businesses want to generate the most revenue from the most effective marketing efforts, cost-wise.
One way to do this is by using location analytics to allow businesses to target their customers with more precision than ever before. But what exactly is location analytics, and how can you use it in your business? Let's take a look.
What Is Location Analytics?
So, what is location analytics exactly? It’s a visual way of interpreting and analyzing the information portrayed by data when used in conjunction with a mapping system. Simply put, location analytics is gaining insights from location or geographical business data.
The best way to explain it is to look at a simple example. Say, for instance, a business wants to improve its marketing efforts. By looking at its location analytics, it can see from which geographical area most of its sales come from.
With this data in hand, it’ll then be able to increase its marketing efforts in this area to increase its sales. Or it could also consider marketing specifically in areas with fewer sales to increase its exposure in those areas.
Apart from this simple example, location analytics can also be used by businesses such as couriers or postal services to track deliveries or even for military purposes to know the exact location of troops and enemy movements.
What Are Some of the Key Features of Location Analytics?
Traditional charts, graphs, and maps are no longer sufficient when businesses want to gain valuable and relevant insights from location data. This is simply because these sources often miss vital pieces of information.
Businesses should add spatial context to the data for better insights to get the most from this data. This, in turn, means that businesses need certain capabilities to achieve success with location analytics.
Therefore, location analytics should:
- Be automated. It's essential that a location analytics solution automatically recognizes the country, state, city, or GPS coordinates as locations from data. It should also offer an interactive map where businesses can zoom in and focus on the corresponding data for the spot on the map.
- Feature multi-layered maps. Apart from location data, it should add more context to the maps and help businesses find location-based insights by bringing other data into the equation.
- Feature non-geographical maps. Unlike other visualizations, maps instantly connect to a real-world data context that businesses can use to gain fast insights and understanding of the data. Suppose the location analytics solution can map non-geographic spaces. In that case, it brings many other benefits for businesses, from optimizing routing and scheduling to calculating the economic potential of different route networks, optimizing site selection, and more.
- Comply with GIS standards. Businesses require powerful multi-layered maps for the best insights. They should be able to zoom in and find information specific to every level of the map,
- Incorporate third-party base maps. The solution should incorporate global address level geocoding, route calculations, directions, and additional geoprocessing capabilities to analyze data with precision and accuracy.
- Feature advanced location services. Businesses should be able to create more advanced spatial analyses of their own that can allow them to map their data down to the address level.
With these capabilities in mind, businesses can use location analytics to decide on the best location for a store that will be perfectly optimized considering the supply and demand of their products. Likewise, location analytics could, for example, indicate how large a crop yield will be. This means that farmers would be able to know when to sell their products and at what price.
What Are the Benefits?
It’s easy to see why location analytics can be an extremely powerful tool for business profitability. Here, it has the following benefits:
- It can improve a business’s return on investment. Because location analytics can offer accurate insights into a business’s performance and its potential, it can exactly see in what location its business would benefit most and, in the process, save hours that it would have spent on market research.
- It’ll increase sales. Because a business will know exactly where its sales come from, it will be able to increase sales through targeted marketing. Here, it could look at buying patterns, demographics, and even sentiment analysis on a map that will help it make better business decisions.
- It’ll control costs. Because a business can exactly see where its sales come from and where to market, it'll save money because it’ll market more effectively. This means that, in underperforming areas, it could decrease marketing costs that are wasted, and increasing its marketing spending in high-performing areas will lead to more sales.
- It'll boost customer satisfaction. A business knows exactly who its customers are and where they are with location analytics. And by knowing this, it’ll be able to serve customers better, meet their expectations, and give them what they need.
What Are the Challenges You Can Face?
Although these benefits sound fantastic, it's not all good news, though, and businesses face some challenges in gaining valuable insights from location data.
Some of these are:
- Consent and privacy issues. Privacy issues are becoming an increasingly important consideration for users. Businesses will have to focus on letting individuals consent to their data being used, and they will need to be clear on how they collect and use consumer data.
- Data quality. A lack of accuracy in location data is often a big challenge, and, to solve this problem, location analytics solutions should actively verify and remove inaccuracies from the data.
- Readiness to consume the data. A location analytics solution must be able to deliver a location data set that is ready for instant consumption or at least be ready to be integrated with a current data set. If it's not, businesses won't be able to gain valuable insights from the data instantly.
- Data hygiene. Because location data can be a challenge to clean and transform into a workable format, many businesses interested in location analytics experience challenges when processing the data.
How Can DashboardFox Help with Location Analytics?
Location analytics is great because you can use the data you can gather from them to improve and enhance your business. Still, it would be much better if you could visualize it clearly for the stakeholders and customers to see. This is where DashboardFox enters the picture.
Location analytics involves maps, and DashboardFox is absolutely, fully capable of creating maps from scratch. Thanks to their data visualization features, from choropleth maps to heat maps, DashboardFox can do that for you.
DashboardFox offers map layouts of almost every place in the world, but if your desired locality or place isn’t in our arsenal, you can easily request one, and we will do it for you.
The maps that you create using DashboardFox will easily feature location analytics, which, in turn, you can use in dashboards and other forms of data visualization, such as charts and graphs.
Creating maps using DashboardFox won’t be a hassle since they use a core set of charts and graphs that are universally accepted.
Add to that our no-subscriptions policy, our dedicated team of experts ready to assist you whenever you need them, and our self-hosted approach to data security. Then you may have just discovered the BI tool you’ve been searching for.
So what are you waiting for? Schedule a meeting with us, book a live demo for free, reach out to us.
Let’s discuss how DashboardFox can help you with your dashboard and reporting requirements.