You’ve probably seen examples of businesses using location services, but have you considered how you could use them in your own business? Adam Mullett, marketing manager from NGIS, shares terrific examples of how marketers can use mapping tools to tell better stories and provide a visual element to information they’re presenting to their customers.
Adam says using location intelligence allows marketers to provide an excellent customer experience by adding additional value that goes beyond selling products or services. Providing helpful information to customers about things like parking availability and traffic alerts and even helping travellers navigate the complexities of international banking are all within reason.
Here’s the best part for small business. You don’t necessarily need your own location services to get the benefit. A lot of other applications may be including you in their mapping products. Think about popular apps like Yelp or Trip Advisor that automatically identify you on a map when people are looking for products and services in your location.
Here are some key take-outs:
- Location services provide a way for marketers to add value to their customer experience.
- Even small businesses have an opportunity to develop visual content using mapping technology.
‘The only thing that limits business right now is your imagination and how you can use’. — Sarah
- 80% of any data has some sort of spatial component you can plot on a map.
- A lot of data sits in the public domain that even small business can utilise.
‘Maps are all about finding relationships between data. We’re humans; we’re really geared up to see patterns; we love pictures’. — Adam
- Mapping technology is becoming a lot easier to use. It’s not beyond the average marketer to start telling stories using integrated tools between things like email services and mapping technology.
- Make sure your business is listed on Google with the correct address. It helps customers find you and also has a positive impact on your SEO rankings.
‘Today, maps can change the way that we look at businesses and organisations because we can find them easily. We can use them in just about everything we’re going to do today’. — Nic
Here are the links you might need
- For marketing analytics:
Linking MailChimp to CartoDB (easy-to-learn web visualisation software) to get heat maps or temporal maps of opens is especially useful for national or distributed databases of clients.
- For enhanced content marketing:
Esri Story Maps – make your story come to life with maps. Easy to make; get the impressive functionality of the enterprise-level software from Esri.
Google Maps For Work provides industry-specific demos to get you thinking about how you can tell better stories with maps.
Have you heard the one about…
Here’s a discussion about online reviews with Nic Lembo from Yelp.
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