Standing for a Geographic Information System, GIS is a computer mapping tool that captures, stores, displays, and analyzes the Earth’s spatial data. Often used in business, GIS software helps small and large companies alike to better understand local markets and increment sales.
GIS can use any information that is related to a location on the Earth’s surface. This location can be represented in the form of a longitude, latitude, ZIP-code, or an address.
The information GIS gathers, processes, and analyzes can be related to landscapes and physical objects, as well as people, their education, income, and shopping preferences in particular.
The insights obtained using GIS software are particularly useful for business sales purposes.
How GIS can help your business?
All people have their buying patterns, whereas GIS can help locate these patterns, identify sales areas, and offer a better understanding of why transactions happen as they do and how to use it to the advantage of your business.
Such companies as Uber, Starbucks, and Wendy’s use GIS in their daily business operations. However, local and regional companies can also use this technology for making better strategic decisions and avoiding financial losses.
On a customer interaction scale, you can gain insight into where people shop, how they shop, what they shop for, and how to make sure that they shop in your store as often as possible.
On running a local retail business scale, you can gain insights into the best spots to open a retail store, competitors’ activity, various business shortcomings, as well as ways to fix them. You will be able to track almost every operational aspect of your store in real-time using a convenient visual interface.
Speaking of which, one of the key features of GIS is visualization. Instead of 100s of pages of reports, you can get just one interactive heat map containing every key piece of information.
In 2020, gaining such business intel is possible by using mapping software for sales which will help streamline your marketing funnel with valuable geographic and spatial data powered by GIS.
What’s an online mapping tool?
Online mapping tools use spatial analysis data and insights to provide up-to-the-minute commercial data to let you make accurate business decisions.
When searching for the best location for your retail store, an online mapping tool will help you better understand which districts and specific locations are more profitable.
After your venue is all set up, GIS software will be keeping you in the loop regarding every aspect of your business interacting with customers, including customer profile and demographics, their shopping preferences, supply chain and distribution bottlenecks, as well as ways to forecast store performance.
Basically, the online mapping will let you see the real situation on and around your operational territory and adjust your strategy according to the latest changes in shopping trends or market conditions.
Most GIS sales tools available in the market are low-code cloud-based SAAS solutions that don’t require you to hire a dedicated IT team.
How GIS is used in the retail business?
As the owner of a retail business, you have to take into account many factors that determine whether a sale will be successful. One of the key factors is knowing your audience, their behavior, shopping patterns, and preferences.
In the retail business, such insights could be obtained with the help of sales mapping software based on the GIS technology.
Sales mapping tools will allow you to:
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Gather information about your customers (age, gender, education, income, career, etc.)
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Figure out how customers interact with your business.
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Identify the most lucrative sales areas.
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Find the best location for your store.
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Track down the competition.
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Define store management problems.
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See the whole operation picture.
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Optimize delivery routes, customer service, and business interaction.
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Optimize the workload of your employees.
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Determine sales trends and seize opportunities to expand in the market.
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Access risks in real-time.
With the boom of e-commerce retail which has spiked by a staggering 200% since 2014, traditional retail businesses simply can’t make hasty decisions and lose money as a result of a lack of solid sales and marketing data.
In its turn, the GIS sales and logistic mapping gives you all the up-to-date instruments for strategic decision-making when running your local retail business.
Conclusion
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, retail stores should double their effort to optimize business processes and spends. So, if you’re a small or medium retail business owner, you should consider implementing GIS mapping software for sales that will help you make better business decisions based on customer data, market analysis, and predictive modeling.
