You may be wondering why anyone would use business mapping software to enrich their location data. That all depends on how location-based your data and your business may be.
Startup businesses focused almost exclusively on products and services may initially not realize the nature of their location data. When potential customers start requesting price quotes or services from over the mountain, that location suddenly has real meaning for a business.
An organic, natural fast-food restaurant in downtown Gotham focuses on its list of core clients from the surrounding area – roughly a 20-minute drive time from Organic Beast’s drive-through window. But when they realize their success is on fire and they begin to consider selling franchise locations across California, well then suddenly, location means everything to them.
New locations will need to be explored for a business such as Organic Beast. And to do that, franchise location criteria will need to the developed. ‘What are franchise location criteria?’ You ask.
The below location-based assets are beneficial for justification of the purchase of a franchise restaurant business, or any other franchise business type for that matter:
- An actual customer address list.
- A prospective customer address list.
- A typical customer demographic profile, possibly including:
- Most common ethnicities.
- Predominant marital status.
- Median Income levels.
- Drive-time tolerance.
- Other customer characteristics that are specific to your business type. A restaurant might target families, and a hardware store might target contractors.
- A sense of a sales territory size – a geographic area, ZIP codes, or population limit.
- Related industry resources.
Another franchise sales consideration is targeting a specific area of interest with multiple territories designed and tied to the franchise location criteria. Maps are an excellent tool for enticing franchisees to buy. Color-coded critical population areas can show market potential. Be sure to mark and map nearby anchor stores or related tourist attractions. Make your map sing to the business need.
In short, don’t even try to sell a franchise without developing relevant map-related images and graphics. Maps sell franchises – that’s an online mapping software fact.
Enriching Your Business Datasets
MapBusinessOnline Standard enables the import of location-based data, which places color-coded symbols on the map with a linked datasheet view of the data. Those location datasets are usually customer addresses in our business mapping software world. They include sales information, client home locations with clinician data, or other data related to a particular industry. It all adds up to franchise location criteria.
MapBusinessOnline Pro provides the ability to enhance those imported spreadsheets by pulling over columns from other datasets. Your data is imported into MapBusinessOnline and then appended with columns from related location-based data.
Imported location data columns are accessible for other data layers using drive time analysis tools. Let’s search for imported records within 50 minutes of a set of stores. The data query results can then be merged with the store location dataset.
Data Enrichment is a set of features in the Analysis Button. Scroll down the list to the Summarize or Enrich section. Choose between:
- Aggregate Customer Data – use this tool to pull sales data or other columns of numeric data from an imported dataset.
- Summarize Demographics – Pull in three columns of relevant demographic data from the MapBusinessOnline demographic data library. Repeat as necessary for more columns.
- Enrich a Dataset – Append data with demographic or geographic data as required. Geographic information includes ZIP codes, counties, city limits, and other map layers.
Data enrichment is helpful in enticing franchise clients. Take some time to explore your location data and investigate other data sources that can be merged with existing datasets to show additional value.
Try to include statistics relevant to your franchise business. Maybe house sales are brisk in the area where your business focuses its marketing messages. Perhaps include average sell prices or the pace of housing sales. Or possibly, labor markets in the surrounding regions are in dire need of new employers.
MapBusinessOnline Pro also provides the ability to append demographic and geographic data to your imported datasets. Add columns for population, median income, consumer expenditures, and any other column of Demographic data from our library of options. While you’re at it, add a few columns referencing ZIP codes and counties. Or upload a set of business listings to display competitor locations.
All of these imported and appended datasets are exportable as CSV files. A nice set of data to include with the franchise sales agreement.
Consider MapBusinessOnline Pro for location data enrichment in your business.
Why Would a Business Invest in MapBusinessOnline Pro?
Retailers
Connect the drive time tolerance of your critical customers with your marketing campaigns. Manage marketing efforts based on customer proximity to store locations.
Transportation Managers
Manage and measure vehicle route metrics. Calculate miles between all points in two large datasets. Compare anticipated expenses to actual costs.
Medical Systems Expansion
Locate all the major medical businesses within 30 miles of a central medical facility. Create coverage area maps for various medical insurance providers based on proximity to services and customer classifications. Analyze demographic realities by ZIP code to confirm area growth will support robust medical system growth.
Construction
Manage and measure a set of construction site locations – monitor supply requirements, delivery on-timeliness, inspection, certification schedules, and contracted employee project progress.
Finance
Analyze demographic and economic realities for specific urban neighborhoods. Manage and measure loan blocks, real estate values, or employment opportunities.
Insurance
Create map visualizations supporting risk calculations for disaster-prone areas—Including vehicle routing for disaster planning—track claims across regions and cities. Share maps publically for constituent buy-in or privately for collaborative editing.
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Discover why over 25,000 business users log into www.MapBusinessOnline.com for their business mapping software and advanced sales territory mapping solution. The best replacement for Microsoft MapPoint happens to be the most affordable.
To access MapBusinessOnline, please register and download the Map App from the website – https://www.mapbusinessonline.com/App-Download.aspx.
After installing the Map App, the MapBusinessOnline launch button will be in the Windows Start Menu or Mac Application folder. Find the MapBusinessOnline folder in the Start Menu scrollbar. Click the folder’s dropdown arrow and choose the MapBusinessOnline option.
The Map App includes the Map Viewer app for free non-subscriber map sharing.
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Contact: Geoffrey Ives at geoffives@spatialteq.com or Jason Henderson at jhenderson@spatialteq.com
