How GIS supports marketing people in taking the right decisions

Two articles highlight the importance of GIS for marketing people. The first one can be found here. The author argues that GIS is an extremely powerful mapping software tool that can be used to both analyze current customer data to identify trends and to successfully make predictions about changes that are likely to occur based upon these trends. This data can then be used to pinpoint where marketing dollars are best spent.

The other article can be read here. The author talks about CRM and GIS. A company’s CRM system is the first and most valuable data repository, but it is not the only one available. Many government agencies and international organizations publish open-source data, which is freely available to any individual or entity. When combining multiple data sources, assigning a common indexing key for joins is an early but critical requirement as different data providers may conceptualize the same field in different ways. GIS can combine a variety of data sources—client-owned, open-source, and paid research—without direct links among the data sets. While traditional databases rely on key fields to establish and maintain relationships, geo-databases can also use spatial proximity as a method of linking objects to one another. Proximity does not require a matching key, only that each database is connected to some kind of geography (e.g., states, counties or latitude/longitude coordinates).

Supporting marketing people with combining multiple data sources is something we do using one of our products, Sleevemonkey. Check it out and let us know how we can help you make the right marketing decisions.