Mapline Team, Author at Mapline

GIS for Retailers: The Best Way to Attracting Your Target Audience

Written on April 30, 2018. Posted in Blog.

In today’s market, retail brands must understand and anticipate what customers want and need. And with social media and online purchasing giants making it easier than ever for buyers to be extremely selective in their purchases, the pressure is mounting for retailers to break through the noise. So, how does GIS mapping work in retail’s favor when it comes to audience targeting? Here are three ways retailers can leverage GIS for retail selection and reach the right audiences at the right time.

New Heat Mapping Legend

Written on April 19, 2018. Posted in Blog, Updates.

Be wowed again for yet another face of Mapline! Our new and improved logo comes with improved performance and features as well. Along with the logo we’ve updated our heat maps. Learn more about that and check out the other new enhancements.

5 Benefits of GIS for the Retail Industry

Written on March 2, 2018. Posted in Support.

For many retailers, the challenge is the same: location. Geography matters, especially in a hyperconnected world, where the rise of ecommerce means physical stores must craft a bigger and better in-store experience. With maps, retailers gain a competitive advantage. Placing your business data on a map is not only key to visualizing your market, but also understanding it. Let’s take a closer look at five ways GIS mapping benefits retailers.

1. Find Your Site

The wrong location can greatly impact your business’ success, no matter how compelling your product or service. GIS mapping can help retailers determine what type of site is right for their store. Mapping and evaluating for retail site selection involves considering many factors that will help drive sales—from consumer demand and traffic patterns to local populations and much more. A retail market mapping tool gives retailers the power to store, quantify, visualize, and manage site data in order to avoid a potentially poor location.

2. Identify Your Competition

Knowledge is power. And with GIS software, retailers understand exactly where competitors are in relation to their own facility. Competition mapping with GIS moves beyond the spreadsheet and offers a visual representation of nearby competitors, the products and services they offer, their hours of operation, marketing tactics, and more. GIS gives retailers a clear, visual understanding of what is happening in their market, arming them with insights that can drive product development, promotions, and customer loyalty in the face of competition.

3. Analyze Customer Demographics

Understanding your customers and their shopping decisions is crucial to increasing profitability and launching new strategies. To make the most of GIS mapping capabilities, retailers first need basic customer information, such as name, address, postal code, and products purchased. Next, retailers can link this commonly collected data to geographic information using GIS mapping. Not only will you be able to draw insights from location-based demographic data, but also plot profitable customer groups and learn more about lifestyle behaviors.

4. Manage Delivery Routes

A powerful tool for optimizing fleet management, GIS can better inform schedule requests, arrival and departure times, customer sites, and many other facets of supply chain management. Bring complex data to life with mapping analysis, and connect the dots for shipping and delivery processes.

5. Launch Targeted Marketing Campaigns

Retailers who leverage GIS can craft multidimensional representations of customer likes, dislikes, purchasing trends. Analyzing patterns in your market is an essential step in communicating with customers through effective marketing. Using spatial analytics in retail allows you to plan marketing personas and strategies, innovate with new media, and launch direct mail campaigns. Mapping software reveals a world of vital information to retailers, from demographic profiles to nearby competitors, and more. By visualizing information with GIS mapping, retailers can better interpret data, improve decision making, and enhance communications. Learn more about GIS mapping and how you can leverage it for your own business.

Export Printable Maps

Written on January 19, 2018. Posted in Support.

Get printable maps for presentations

Export and print maps right from Mapline! With a few clicks, you can export images the size of your screen or even blow them up to 4 times the size of your screen for enlarged printing. There are three image sizes:

Regular – Creates a map that is the size of your screen.
Large – Creates a map that is double the size of your screen.
Extra Large – Creates a map that is four times the size of your screen.

Naturally, the higher the zoom level the more detailed the map will be. Meaning the Extra Large map will be the most detailed map, but will also be a much larger image than the other two. To see exactly how the map would look printed, make sure to view the downloaded image at the 100% zoom level.

Steps to export a map

Open your map in Mapline
Click on “Options.”
Click on “Save as Image.”
Select what you want to export (Map or Sidebar)
Select the image size you want

Ready to learn more about building and creating maps with Mapline. Click the button below to see our plans and pricing page.

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More Flexibility with the Excel Add-in

Written on January 10, 2018. Posted in Blog, Updates.

We’ve wasted no time this year to improve Mapline, and you can expect updates throughout the year. We’ve fixed some bugs, improved one of our features, and added additional columns to your datasets as well.

Mapline Updates for API and Segments

Written on December 22, 2017. Posted in Blog, Updates.

As 2017 comes to a close, we finished it off by making more updates to the software. Now Mapline users will have more customization and flexibility with their maps.

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