An Overview about Geo-Marketing

Geo-Marketing is a rather new discipline within Marketing-Analysis, so there is very few experience or expertise on implementing and using it. The goal of this section is to give you an overview what it is, what you can do with it, what you will need, ...

A Definition:

Geo-Marketing means using geographic information in the process of planning and implementation of marketing activities. Geo-Marketing takes a deep look at peculiarities of a specific geographic area and tries to incorporate the conclusions into the design of a marketing activity by tailoring it to the very needs of this area. To achieve this goal, Geo-Marketing heavily uses GIS (geographic information systems) and data with a geographical context.

• What can Geo-Marketing do for you?
• Why should you use Geo-Marketing?

What can Geo-Marketing do for you?

Geo-Marketing is an excellent tool for displaying data that has a geographical context (= can be linked to a geographic region or area). It can help to obtain answers to questions like:

• tell you WHERE your customers are
• visualize any data in a geographic context by linking it to a digital map.
• locate something on a digital map
• calculate summary information for specific areas
• select customers within specific areas
• select customers with a certain radius of a point
• using micro-geographic segmentation select customers similar to a specific type in the rest of the country
• solve problems regarding location of a new outlet

Though, this is still an overview about the topics where Geo-Marketing can give you very valuable support. If you start using Geo-Marketing you will soon discover that it can open access to a completely new universe of Marketing activities based on geographic information.

Why should you use Geo-Marketing?

As some marketing professionals mentioned:

"Marketing is no longer an art, it is a science"

(Clancy / Schulman)

Due to this changes to the requirements of a professional Marketer, you will start doing a heap of analysis, using huge amount of data.

One of the first problems you most likely will face (except getting the data, putting it into a proper database-structure and analyze it - see the Database-Marketing section for help on these) will be how to display the extracted information without getting lost in thousands of rows of figures.

"A picture tells you more than a thousand words ..."

... which is of course also true for Marketing analysis!

Since most of us are more the visual type, endless rows of pure figures can be very confusing. This is why Marketers started to extensively use charts for displaying data to reveal inner relationships within the data. With using only charts you may be able to reveal anything BUT a geographical dependency of your information.

And this is the point where you will find one of the strengths of Geo-Marketing. By associating the data with the according geographic region, you may convert the output from endless listings to nicely designed digital maps, which could be i.e. shaded according to the value lying underneath

Professional implementations of Geo-Marketing are still few, though the demand for it is consistently growing. If you already have some experience and wish to contribute to this section (or simply disagree with anything stated herein), please contact the web-master.