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Which tools do you use in Geo-Marketing?The core tool required for Geo-Marketing is a GIS - Geographic Information System . This software handles displaying and assigning data to geographic entities for you, so that you really can focus on analyzing the data and drawing conclusions. They typically have a GUI that allows you "point-and-click" querying and manipulation of the objects and the data beneath. What they actually do is to access information stored in electronic maps (like ZIP-code areas) and allow to combine these maps with data directly pulled from your corporate databases - CIFs, orders, ... . The main advantage of GIS solutions is that it has information about the geographical arrangement of these areas (like: "is ZIP-code ABC located north/south/west/... of ZIP-code ABD or is it in a completely different region") and pure geographic data (like: size of such an area, distance from north to south, ....) . Some major providers of GIS-solutions:
Depending on your system environment such GIS start from several hundred US$, but for professional systems the cost for GIS may easily run into several 1000 US$ (you may want to visit the homepages of the providers and have look at their pricing informations). GIS became rather popular when the first tools for desktop PCs were developed. Note! The nice thing behind this alliance is that you should be able to use all of your digital maps directly with this tool! Before you decide on a particular GIS-software, you may want to read the notes about "GIS-Considerations" which covers some of our experiences. And do not forget that you will need electronic maps and data to load into the GIS (see the "Requirements for geographic data"-section for details)! |
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