Geo-Marketing

Geo-Marketing means using geographic information in the process of planning and implementation of marketing activities. Geomarketing Research is the use of geographic parameters in research methodology starting from sampling, data collection, analysis, and presentation. Geomarketing Services are more related to routing, territorial planning, and site selection whereas the location is the key factor for such disciplines. It is designed to locate customers, their characteristics, the presence of competitors, potential turnover in a region of a particular product based on region, expected market share, identifying location of new branches, expansion possibilities, promotion and advertising activities.

It can be used in any aspect of the marketing mix - the Product, Price, Promotion, or Place.

Functions of Geomarketing:

· Helps identify and matching products and promotions with lifestyle and consumer buying behaviour

· Delimits the catchments area

· Helps identify retail sites

· Uses GIS to identify trends in a market

· Predict sales

· Design sales territories

· Media and advertising according to geography

Company decisions draw their life-blood from the information upon which they are based and that information must be processed. Geomarketing is able to cast a light into the darkness of many a question by bringing unwieldy data into a local context and then presenting it in an easily understandable format as a map. It is often possible to make even very blurred interrelationships clear in this way. The core base of Geomarketing is the digital map; it can either make or break the concept. Equally important, though, is the association of data with these maps using some place-based component. With relatively simple GIS systems, one can map where their customers are coming from, especially if you have access to detailed neighborhood boundary information that can be uploaded to the GIS system. That could lead to some interesting insights.

The methodology Geomarketing is successfully applied in the financial sector through identifying ATMs traffic generators and creating hotspots maps based on geographical parameters integrated with customer behavior.

A typical example for different web content by choice in geo marketing and geo targeting is the FedEx website at FedEx.com where users have the choice to select their country location first and are then presented with different site or article content depending on their selection.

Professional implementations of Geo-Marketing are still few, though the demand for it is consistently growing.

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