Ensuring that as a business efforts are directed to the right target, it is useful to create a profile of the ideal customer, or a so-called customer persona. A company can do this based on its own customer data by working out lifestyle, demographics and buying habits of their most loyal and profitable customers.

It’s important to weigh up different buying patterns; profit margins may be quite similar in areas where people tend to buy small value items regularly and areas where people buy less frequently but higher-end items.

Once a business has developed customer personas, location analytics can come into play again; with the right analysis method – crunching through publicly and privately available datasets and additionally being able to display the results on a map – it is easy to spot areas that correspond to the customer persona. It should then also be straightforward to adjust parameters and consider the effects of alternatives.

As a result, the business can make more informed decisions about which areas to target and in what way, whether that be through local advertising, direct marketing, or geographically-targeted social media promotions.

Newer businesses with little or less reliable customer data can still use the location analytics approach by looking at available data of competitor businesses. A business can look for common attributes among the demographics of people who live in a particular catchment area. This can produce the data needed to investigate other areas that have matching profiles but that the rival business has not yet reached.

It can be a tricky business working out how to reach the ideal customer, but location analytics is a great way to make the process foolproof and more efficient.