Where do I locate my business to attract the right customers?
As a business leader, you’ll want to ensure that your branches, shops, offices, or venues are located in the perfect places to attract the right customers.
You may know who your target customers are and may even have developed a typical customer profile, but how do you know where these buyers are and where to position your new premises to maximise your sales to them?
These are questions we’re often asked at Tech4T by businesses of all types – from restaurant chains that want to ensure their venues attract passers-by, to retail businesses that want to make sure their shops or trade counters are located where customers can easily find them. And the same applies to companies that want to relocate their offices or headquarters (often from expensive inner-city locations) to an area that is easily accessible for support services and staff.
As experts in location planning, we know that there are numerous important factors that should be considered to get the right answers.
Firstly when considering any area for a new premises, it is vital to understand the demographics of the local population (or of local businesses if you are a B2B company).
What is the average age of buyers in the area? What are their shopping habits? What is their average income? What kind of lifestyles do they lead? These are all questions – amongst many others – that a business needs to fully understand to know whether a location contains enough customers with the right profiles to make their new venture a success.
It is then important to understand logistical factors that can heavily influence how a new business location performs. For example, are there good local transport links or is the area difficult to get to and blighted by traffic congestion? Is there good parking nearby and can suppliers as well as customers easily reach you? Are the immediate surroundings well-lit and maintained? These are all practical factors that may mean that although the location looks great on paper and may even contain a high number of your target customers, the new premises are unlikely to succeed.
And the same goes for your staff. If they find it difficult to get to you or feel the area is unsafe, then you may find it hard to recruit the people you need to work there.
Local competition is another important factor to consider when deciding upon the location of your new business branches. In all likelihood, if an area has a high number of buyers that match your ideal customer profile, it is likely that rival businesses that do the same (or a similar thing) as you will be targeting them too. This may mean that the area is saturated with businesses just like yours, leading to the need to run special offers and discounts just to stay afloat.
But competition in an area is not necessarily a bad thing. For one, existing businesses in an area can indicate that the location is popular with the type of customers you want to reach. And often having several businesses of the same type in the same location can attract customers to it, the businesses collectively acting like a magnet for consumers who exactly match your ideal customer profile.
Understanding all this information and utilising it to make the right planning decisions can be difficult and time consuming without specialist help. That’s why Tech4T created Territory Runner, the most comprehensive and easy-to-use Location Intelligence System around, that presents all the relevant data on fully interactive zoomable maps that can be interrogated from postcode / zip code level all the way through to national and international level.
This makes it easy and quick to locate the perfect customers in the perfect places and ensure your business locations are 100% right.
