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Marketing and Location Intelligence

3 Ways Brick-and-Mortar Stores Are Using Location Intelligence

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Many brick-and-mortar stores suffered financial losses in recent years due to the ease and efficiency of online shopping. While some businesses view the rise of online shopping as the ultimate enemy, innovative businesses are using the shift in consumer shopping habits as an opportunity to develop new and exciting incentives for driving traffic into their stores.

Omnichannel marketing is a powerful way for brick-and-mortar businesses to leverage multiple marketing channels to drive greater brand awareness, in-store traffic, and sales. Location based insights are at the core of this, helping businesses illustrate their unique value proposition and provide fun and fresh ways for customers to engage with their brand.

Here’s how successful brick-and-mortar stores drive foot traffic and generate sales using location intelligence:

Leverage Geofencing:

  • Gain competitive insights: Conduct trade area analysis by placing geofences around competitors to reveal how often your customers visit them. You can pair this with tracking competitor deals and incentives to gain knowledge on how to steer customers back to you…or keep them from visiting competitors in the first place.
  • In-store incentives: If your customers allow notifications, you can deliver limited time pop-up ads every time they are within a certain distance from your store, or an extra deal when they are about to leave your store.  Input customer data: Location intelligence platforms allow you to input customer information, useful for developing targeted marketing campaigns. This includes precise mailing addresses and detailed demographic information.

Precise direct mail campaigns:

Studies show that direct mail ROI is strong when marketers use omnichannel marketing methods to deliver a seamless and personalized customer experience to match lifestyles with customer buying trends. Pairing digital intelligence with direct mail can produce powerful results. Location technology delivers detailed demographic information along with accurate postal codes so that you are delivering the right message to the right people rather than wasting time and money on consumers that are unlikely to be interested in your product or service.

Location-based insights for site selection:

For brick and-mortar stores looking to open a new shop or to relocate, location intelligence platforms provide essential information on ideal locations. This includes demographic data, a historic view of how an area has changed over time, new developments, nearby points of interest, and much more.

Using location technology and the powerful insights it provides helps businesses integrate marketing channels for an omnichannel marketing approach. This leads to precise messaging and a highly compelling customer-centric experience that will have customers regularly engaging with your business on and offline.

To learn more download our guide Using Location Based Insights for Omnichannel Marketing

Additional Reading:  

5 Ways Canadian Retailers Should Be Using Location Data and Technology

Location Technology

Meet the Newest Member of the Digital Map Products Board of Directors

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Dave Cozzens will leverage his deep industry experience to provide consultative guidance around Digital Map Products’ strategic growth and positioning initiatives.

We are proud to announce the addition of Dave Cozzens to our board of directors!

Location Technology

From Our Press Release

“We are excited to welcome Dave Cozzens to our board of directors,” said James Skurzynski, founder and CEO of Digital Map Products. “Dave’s background and success in location technology, combined with his focus on innovation and customer value, will be a tremendous asset as we continue to drive strong demand for our solutions.”

Cozzens most recently served as the CEO of Telogis, a global enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) company providing location technology solutions for fleet and mobile workforce management. Under Cozzens’ leadership, Telogis grew from a start-up with $3 million in revenue to one of the dominant players in the rapidly growing connected vehicle and smart mobility market. As a result, Telogis was acquired by Verizon Communications in August 2016. Cozzens joined Telogis from Novell Corporation, where he served as vice president of operations for Novell Americas, a $500 million business encompassing the U.S., Canada, and Latin America.

Hear From Dave Cozzens

“I’m thankful for the opportunity to share my expertise and skills with a location technology company poised for continued growth and one highly focused on the success of its customers,” said Cozzens. “I look forward to working with Digital Map Products’ talented management team to extend the company’s market leadership and support their mission to embed location technology and data into the everyday workflows of businesses and government agencies across North America.”

Want to Learn More?

Visit our Board of Directors page for more information about Mr. Cozzens and the rest of our board. To learn more about our all-in-one location intelligence platform, contact us today! You can also download a sample of our category-defining nationwide parcel data by filling out the short form below.

Retail Store Site Selection Location Data

5 Ways Canadian Retailers Should Be Using Location Data and Technology

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Read to know why location technology and location data sets are indispensable weapons in any retailer’s artillery

Read more
Location Data and the Telecom Industry

Top 5 ways the Telecom sector is leveraging Location Data

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Read to know why 70% of telecom companies are convinced that accurate location data is critical to their success

A telecom business has to face a range of burning questions on a regular basis: Where are my customers? Where is my crew needed the most? Where do I need to expand capacity? Where is my network lacking quality? Each of these questions has a foundation in spatial information.

For an industry as competitive as telecommunications, understanding relationships, trends, and patterns in a quick and efficient way is imperative to keep up with the evolving market dynamics. Location data helps telecom operators to visualize the myriad layers of data in a manner which is easy to understand and interpret. But even more importantly, it helps unlock pertinent insights previously not available to the business. So, it’s not surprising that the 2018 Location Intelligence Market Study by Dresner Advisory Services pegs location data as a key success factor for 70% of telecom companies.

Let’s discuss some of the most profitable ways in which the telecom sector is leveraging location data…

1.  Market Segmentation

Location data is the underpinning of all market segmentation activities like identifying high-revenue areas, segregating customers on the basis of their demography and buying behaviour, ascertaining where new building projects are coming up, or even undertaking a competitor analysis. Prudent telecom operators are using location data to boost their intelligence with customer profiling and determine the potential of the market correctly. This further allows them to determine where new capital investment needs to be allocated and where marketing budgets should be channeled for maximum impact.

2.  Network Analysis

Using accurate location data gives operators and crew instant access to customer details, enabling them to map signal quality information with their user base and identify where the signal strength is good or poor. Being able to visualize assets geographically also allows for better monitoring of the network and expedition of maintenance and repairs. And when it comes to making inroads into an already competitive market, precise location data helps telecom companies to identify new market opportunities in the proximity of their assets and expand network capacity in a cost-effective manner. Which brings us to the next point in our list…

3.  Capacity Planning

To plan and manage their capacity judiciously, telecom companies not only need to be able to map their current user base properly, they should be able to locate the pockets of future growth meticulously. Using location data, companies can zero in on new prospects by leveraging insights into current profitable customers to look for similar prospects. Here, the intelligence derived through market segmentation activities also comes into play. Location data analytics provide a solid decision-support ground for capital investments.

4.  Serviceability

The importance of providing a definitive and timely service cost assessment for new customers is not lost on progressive telco businesses. Accurate address information gives the sales team the confidence to upsell products without worrying about the availability of those services. When it comes to analyzing and tracking the serviceability for commercial accounts, telcos can easily map location information against serviceability and make sure a new customer opportunity does not turn into a bad customer service problem. Businesses can even plan to increase serviceability based on the competitive insights derived from authentic location data.

5. Customer Service

Effective customer relationship management gives a much-needed competitive edge to telecom companies. Having a unique address identifier  for each customer can eliminate communication errors and boost the speed and quality of customer handling. By resolving user queries and complaints in a timely manner, operators can improve the relationship between the company and the customer, thereby reducing the chance of a customer jumping to another provider (churning). They can also make significant cost savings by reducing the need for return visits by the field crew.

In a nutshell, location data is a strategic planning tool the telecommunications industry can use to enhance its capabilities, reduce errors, and carry out processes more accurately. Forward-thinking telcos are already using location data to improve market penetration and enhance their network design and coverage. To know more about how your telecom business can leverage location data for better operational efficiency and customer satisfaction, contact us.

Additional Reading:

A telecom operator’s guide to selecting a 5G cell site with Location Intelligence

 

Data visualization for government

When a whole city changes…

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Providing the best data visualization products for Canada means investing in the best sources of information possible. Streetfiles, postal codes and address points are key layers and must be accurate.

DMTI’s Data Visualization Tools

DMTI identifies areas to work on ranging from new subdivisions to urbanizing rural areas. Typically, the number of changes per area ranges from a few to a few hundred.

Our team occasionally encounters a scenario where a municipality has changed so much that it appears completely different. Everything is affected — from the street name to the postal codes that provide mail to their residents and businesses.

The Case of Shawinigan, QC.

Shawinigan is a city located on the Saint-Maurice River in the Mauricie area in Quebec, Canada. The population is 50,060 as of the Canada 2011 Census as per Wikipedia and 26,230 private dwellings occupied by usual residents.

As part of our focus on Canada, we are continually updating and comparing three (3) main sources of information. This includes  streets, postal codes and addresses.

Our data team compared the latest Canada Post data against the current database. We found that Shawinigan, QC – many addresses suddenly fell out due to changes.

An investigation revealed the area recently changed most of their addresses, and was planning to change more.  The Canada Post data was actually showing only about half of the changes. Nearly the whole area would be affected!

We compared this finding against additional sources to fact check the changes. Our team made the city-wide changes to our data as soon as possible.

The result was some Canada Post fallout within the product. But this allowed us to deliver greater accuracy and stay aligned with the changes.

Due to the scope of the changes (an entire municipality!) – the entire data team banded together and got this update into our upcoming Aug 2016.3 data release because of how important it is to ensure our products are in alignment.

Congratulations Data Team, and thank you for your on-going commitment to data quality and currency and all of the other changes that went into this release!

Click here to learn more about how DMTI Spatial delivers complete accuracy, helping businesses get ahead of the competition.

Location Intelligence and Summertime

The productive days of summer?

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Many businesses think summer is the time to relax. It’s also a great time to gain a competitive advantage through location intelligence and data insights.

Your summer business strategy may consist of three (3) simple steps to gain that competitive edge:

  1. Look for easy access to data
  2. Ensure comprehensive data selection
  3. Better understand your risk

Look for Easy Access to GIS Data

When looking for risk related data:

  • Confirm the data is available through a web service.  This allows you to integrate information into your current platform such as the Purview AVM data and perils related data.
  • Understand how to obtain the highest match rate between your database and data services. This helps to avoid ambiguous addressing through the use of a unique address identifier (UAID®).

Location Intelligence Success Story

Lenders using DMTI Spatial’s™ Location Hub® platform can search the national Purview web service using the UAID which is assigned to every address for Canada with roof-top precision.

Ensure Comprehensive GIS Data Selection

Teranet partnered together with DMTI Spatial to provide complimentary capabilities to shared clients. This partnership provides clients with a complete view of their data.

Teranet DMTI Spatial
Addresses
Property Ownership Flood
Property Valuation Earthquake
Equity Estimate Crime
Comparable Sales Environmental Risk
Fraud Checks Demographics
House Price Index (HPI) Firmographics

With over 15M addresses in Canada, having access to the most comprehensive risk-based information at the property level allows insurance and finance companies to generate new insights.

Understand Your Risk

With this wealth of location-based information businesses can benefit in the following ways:

  • Understand the risks associated with specific geographical areas and leverage that knowledge to fine-tune pricing
  • Link disparate information for real-time decision making
  • Enhance portfolio analysis across the entire book of business

Summary

Take advantage of the down-time that summer offers. Evaluate your current systems and workflows and explore solutions that provide comprehensive information to help you hit the ground running in the fall.

Learn how location intelligence can help your business by contacting DMTI Spatial.

GIS Mapping Software

A Lesson in Map-Folding Origami

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Do you use maps? I’m fairly certain you do, possibly a GIS mapping app on a daily basis. When I was 16 and learning to drive maps were these sticky, dirty, impossible to fold, gigantic pieces of paper I always managed to rip while shoving back into the glove box. “You be the navigator, I’ll be the driver.” Remember those days?

Today we don’t have to worry about map origami (seriously, who actually folded it right the first time?!). I personally have 2 mapping apps on my Android, both of which have totally different purposes.

GIS Mapping Apps in order of favouritism:

1) Waze – Hands down one of the most fun and accurate traffic applications out there. Excellent UI and hilariously fun Voice Navigation, (I highly encourage everyone to try “Boy Band”). This app is intended to effortlessly navigate you through high traffic and accident-prone areas. Definitely my choice of app when it comes to getting from A to B.

2) Google Maps – With over 4.8 million Android users alone, this application is well known for its pros and cons. While it is definitely the easiest application to operate, it nearly never locates my gps position in under 5 minutes. This is my app of choice when looking up an area or trying to find a specific address.

You will notice these apps are very centered around my inability to navigate when driving, or using transit. How else would I use maps as a consumer?

Here’s Why the Average Person Needs a GIS Mapping App:

  • Get me from Home to ‘X’
  • Get me from Work to ‘X’
  • Find me the closest Subway to ‘X’

Pretty simple isn’t it? Not if you’re a Business.

Using GIS Mapping Software in the Business World

Maps in the business world are complex. Heck, that’s why we have GIS mapping apps. As this Esri link tells us, nearly every business benefits from understanding their environment. Better decision making, cost savings, etc. Whether you are in Retail, Land Development, or Health Care, it matters to know where your Customers/Clients are located. Better yet, if you have a GIS professional on your team – they can build you a map!

Take Health Care for example. DMTI Spatial worked with the Ontario Medical Association to understand where their Physicians were located in relation to the population in Ontario. While this exercise sounds easy, it was a complex project that resulted in a table of over 142 billion records – one of the largest data deliveries in DMTI’s 20 year history. Where your Customers are located matters.

Now consider Retail. What if you found out your most loyal customers (aka the ones that spend the big bucks) are located within 10 km of your store. Would you consider marketing to these neighbourhoods? Or divert marketing dollars that were intended for a 30km + distribution?

Today we use maps to make business decisions. Only these maps are digital, and sometimes come with a boy band singsong voiceover (again, I highly suggest it).

Want to integrate a basic map into your Business process? Want to visualize where your customers are? Let me know and I can help. But, I can’t fold that blasted paper map back up for you.

Predictive Analytics Data

Gone fishin’… in a data lake? Predictive Analytics Launch!

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Our new Predictive Analytics product launches in less than 2 weeks! As we approach this exciting milestone, we anxiously anticipate the loud ‘splash’ when LEADS (the codename for the product) finally hits the market. I use splash somewhat literally and quite purposefully, as we reside in the era of the “data lake.”

What is a Data Lake?

 The buzz term data lake is progressively used to describe “a state in which all data resides in one environment and can be explored and interpreted without imposing a schema”. Martin Willcox of Teradata eloquently describes the data lake as promoting three big ideas:

  1. Captures data in a centralized Hadoop-based repository
  2. Stores data in a raw form
  3. Enables the breakdown of barriers that inhibit analytics

Picture yourself fishing in a small canoe in a vast open body of peaceful water. As you peer over the side of the canoe you can see clearly beneath the surface into a limitless sea. Within the waters you can see hundreds, if not thousands, of fish swimming carefree. Each fish is a different color and each fish carelessly brushes against your line. As each fish passes your fishing rod tremors, but it is not until the right fish decides to take the bait that you begin the experience of fighting for your prize.

New Insights are Coming from DMTI

Welcome to the data lake. Each fish is a new variable or piece of data you may or may not have seen before. This intelligence you have been exposed to will allow you to gain the valuable insight from a sea of information that is seemingly too difficult or disparate to collect yourself.

This is what LEADS will do. Stay Tuned!

Click here to see DMTI’s GIS Mapping software solution.

Disaster risk management in oil spill

Properties, Oil and Water Don’t Mix

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Oil and Water Don’t Mix.  That was especially true on Wed April 8, 2015 when a tanker in the English Bay in Vancouver was reported to be leaking fuel into the surrounding waters.

The spill amount was “above the norm” but not “catastrophic.” Local residents were warned to avoid the beaches on both sides of the bay, according to CBC News,

Transport Canada has reported the following major oil spills in western Canada:

  • In 1988, Vancouver Island was affected by a spill from an oil barge that lost approximately 87 tons of oil
  • In 2006, a B.C. ferry sank with 240 tons of oil on board.

Gauging the impact

You can view an event zone on a map and determine exposure quickly by linking impacted addresses to your book of business with DMTI’s Location Hub® Post Event Service. Custom event reports allow you to easily share exposure information across your organization. This ensures swift action and superior customer service.

What is the impact of oil spills on property values?

A report created by the Conversations for Responsible Economic Development (CRED) reveals the following key findings:

  • Both direct contamination & the perception of contamination have clear and well documented impacts
  • In several documented cases, directly impacted properties lost 10-40% of their value
  • The reputational impacts alone are significant – properties nearby spills will usually see a 5-8% reduction in value
  • The most significant impacts are felt in the first year and usually last less than 5 years

Assessing future risk

A proposed pipeline destined to carry more oil to the Westridge terminal in Burnaby, BC would increase the number of tankers traveling through Canadian waters from 5 to 34 per month (Global News).

How can organizations prepare?

  • Connect. Analyze. Act™
    • Seek a solution that provides timely and advanced insight into the duration, size, impact and number of addresses affected by an event. This allows you to easily share exposure information across your organization.
  • National insights in real-time
    • Take advantage of an offering that delivers property level event information and other perils that may impact your book of business.

How can I learn more?

 

Building Location Technology

In the Beginning There Were Maps: 20 years of DMTI history

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“The overall mission and goals of the company have remained virtually unchanged throughout our history.”  – John Fisher, Founder – DMTI Spatial

In 1994, DMTI Spatial was born with the purpose of helping our customers improve the way they did business by leveraging the power of location. We knew that location was special, and had enormous potential to improve decision making and operations, and we had a unique ability to harness it.

We set out to be a software company, but we found that the software was useless without good foundation mapping to support it.  So first we built the maps. We could have done what others were doing – driving the roads to build the maps. But we wanted to create foundation data for many purposes, not just navigation – so we needed a better way.

Canada – the birthplace for GIS

Being based in Canada, we were fortunate. A country as large as Canada with a relatively small population needs a way to administer the huge tracts of land very efficiently. Because of this there was a huge legacy of digital map data available.  The only problem: it was a patchwork of uncoordinated bits. It needed to be seamed together from a variety of sources.

We figured the only way to accomplish this massive undertaking was to automate as much as possible. So we did. We created software to do most of the work, and supplemented with skilled labour (GIS technicians) to handle what the automation couldn’t.

Canada’s first digital street map

DMTI Spatial created the first coast-to-coast digital street map for Canada, using the National Topographic Database from Natural Resources Canada as the primary base, supplemented by many other federal, provincial and municipal datasets. We called it CanMap®, and it was the definitive Canadian base map for digital applications.

As our customers became more sophisticated in their use of the technology, there was a need to add more depth and precision to our maps. We added hundreds of layers of data to the street map fabric, including postal geography, electoral geography, 3 dimensional Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data and many others. We built a complete, seamless water layer for Canada, connecting all of the streams, lakes and rivers. For inter-modal transportation, we created a national rail network. For the mobile phone industry we created coast-to-coast clutter mapping for radio propagation analysis – which was used by telecommunications companies to deploy national cellular coverage. We built land use models, assembled demographics and built point of interest data.

And we called it CanMap 2.0

CanMap 2.0 set a new bar for location data excellence in the marketplace.

Others sought us out to build data for them and we built out over 10 million parcel boundaries for the U.S. for First American®.

A history of firsts

A fundamental tool for using location data efficiently is the geocoder. We were not happy with the quality of the available geocoders, so we set out to build our own. Based on our superior knowledge of Canadian geography and Canadian addresses we designed a solution that would make use of the high precision and extensive attribution of the CanMap base. Since Canada is bilingual we created a French-English geocoder, the first in the world.

To add greater precision we developed point level addresses – another first – and incorporated this data into the first point address geocoder.

By the time DMTI Spatial was 10 years old we had a huge catalogue of data products with thousands of variations. We began to combine our technology and data with others in new and different ways to create new hybrid products.

Thinking outside the box

Around this time we came up with a revolutionary new idea – why not combine the digital vector data such as our CanMap street maps with raster imagery – satellite and airborne – to create a new hybrid map/image? We approached Digital Globe and proposed a partnership – a co-branded product we called Satellite Streetview. Digital Globe was so impressed with this product that they started showing it around, and caught the attention of an internet search company. That company was Google™.

Our customers began to ask how were able to combine such large volumes of disparate data into one seamless database. They said that they had similar issues with their own data and wondered if we could help. To solve this problem we repurposed our internal data consolidation software and geocoding software, and Location Hub® was born.

A key innovation was the development and use of a persistent location ID – the Unique Address Identifier (UAID®), as a simple, elegant way to tie all data associated with a particular location to one unambiguous index key.

Based on the success of Location Hub and the UAID we then expanded this capability to embrace the wide world of 3rd party data. If we were able to stamp all incoming data records with a UAID, then any database processed through Location Hub would be instantly integrated with all other datasets processed through the Hub. And so the Location Economics Ecosystem was born.

What’s in store for 2015?

With all this data and processing power available in one software platform, the next logical step was to add analytics to the mix.  DMTI Spatial is getting ready to deploy a new Location-based analytics product this spring. It’s totally new to the spatial visualization field, is incredibly fast and efficient at profiling, requires very little data awareness and manipulation, and is geared to fit multiple verticals without breaking much of a sweat.

Building on our heritage of innovation and creativity, we continue will to help businesses grow through actionable insights uncovered by leveraging location to bring together and analyze a growing world of data. We will continue to make breakthrough products that change the way people use location.

~ John Fisher, Founder – DMTI Spatial

Click here to see how DMTI helps businesses throughout Canada leverage location technology.

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