3 Ways Customer Mapping Changes Your Life

The Source Local Marketing Blog Explores 3 Ways Customer Mapping Changes Your Life by Giving You Broader Perspective on Marketing Strategy

customer-mapping

Customer Mapping Will Change Your Life & Your Perspective

Customer mapping is just one of the ways you can incorporate data visualization into your marketing strategy.  Seeing where your customers live, or in the B2B case, seeing where your customers are located, expands your perspective and can change your marketing life.

There are two primary ways we like to visualize customers on a map.  The first is a Customer Heat Map.  In the example below, customers are visualized by county, and each county is color-coded to show the density of customers in that area.  The results ran counter to what our client perceived was happening, and dramatically changed our recommendations for future targeting.

customer-heat-map

The second is just the “brute force” method of visualizing every customer as a dot on the map.  This can be particularly useful when you want to zoom in on specific neighborhoods to look for clusters.  There is a concept in marketing theory called, “Birds of a Feather, Flock Together” and customer mapping can be a great way to look for examples of that.

customer-mapping

In the example above, our client was looking for potential locations for additional stores.  By mapping customers, we were able to see concentrations of customers who were traveling long distance to visit other stores.

Change #1: Fact Vs Perception

Seeing all of your customers on a map challenges your perception of where you think they are, and allows you to make decisions based on actual facts.  In fact, it’s quite common that customer mapping identifies areas you didn’t realize were hot zones for your business, and often demonstrates that areas you think are “hot,” are “not.”

Change #2: Seeing Possibilities

When you see all of your customers on a map, you often see new possibilities you hadn’t considered.  For example, you may see an area where you SHOULD be doing better and realize you have more work to do to build top of mind awareness there.  And watching how customer mapping shifts over time can show you how the market is changing.  You will likely see emerging hot zones faster, and be able to target those for more intensive marketing efforts.

Change #3: Fixing Inefficiencies

Looking at your customers on a map inevitably calls out inefficiencies you need to fix.  The most common example of this is having too much emphasis on an area that just isn’t producing new customers, or too little attention on an area that’s hotter than you thought.

Get a Free Map

We’re so sure that visualizing your customers on a map will help you be a better marketer, we’ll map your customer database for free, and without any further obligation from you.

We invest time and effort in getting to know potential customers, and in so doing we’ve found it’s a great way for customers to get to know us in a more meaningful way.  So we’ll generate customer mapping for you as a good faith effort to help you learn more about what makes your business successful.

Just schedule a free initial consultation with our team, and let us know you’d like to generate customer mapping before the call.  We’ll execute an NDA so your customer data is safe, and we promise not to use it for any other purpose.

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Whether you take us up on our map offer or not, join our free e-mail newsletter so you’ll get notified periodically about new articles we’ve posted in our Local Marketing Blog.

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After 3 decades as a professional marketer, serial entrepreneur and business consultant Steven Ludwig shares his best practices for small business marketing for owners, managers, and marketers with limited time, money, and expertise. Steven started his professional marketing career in broadcasting in the early ‘90s in Chicago after attending Valparaiso University. After a brief stint at an advertising agency specializing in entertainment and sports marketing where he worked with radio and television stations, movie theatre companies, record labels, musicians, and professional sports teams, he moved to Nashville to form The Marketing Group with his long-time business partner, Jim Wood. Having worked with some of the largest brands in the world, in 2010 he returned to local marketing primarily out of an interest and excitement for working with small business owners to build stronger companies. That desire comes out of early days in radio, where he worked closely with everything from car dealerships to restaurants, insurance and real estate agents, banks, home services companies, and specialty retailers of all kinds. Over the past decade, he has been on the bleeding edge of digital marketing technology, constantly seeking to understand complex strategies employed by giant corporations and then translate those capabilities into tactics small businesses can execute at a local level. Today, in addition to other business ventures with his wife and other long-time business partners, he still lives outside Nashville in Franklin, Tennessee and currently serves as Executive Chairman of EmpowerLocal, a digital marketing company building a nationwide network of digital, hyperlocal news and lifestyle publishers to provide efficient advertising opportunities for local, regional, and national brands.

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