A customer's home address is a marketing gold mine. It often reveals volumes about social status, lifestyle, and most importantly, potential shopping habits. The trick is tying this information to your existing customer files. Geographic information systems (GIS) apps like MapInfo Professional and Microsoft MapPoint 2002 ($249) do this work for you.
Champion Printing & Advertising is a commercial printing and presort bureau based in Jackson, Michigan. Rather than watch customers blow big money sending promotional mailings to the wrong prospects, Champion CEO Mike Shutler began using MapInfo Professional to map clients' customer areas and pinpoint the best neighborhoods to target. The software costs $1,495 for a single-user license; demographics for any one state cost $2,590, or $7,995 for the entire United States.
Geographically targeting marketing mailings has lowered Champion Printing's costs and dramatically increased response rates for its clients. "We've used [MapInfo] with 15 or 20 customers so far," says Shutler. "Before, we might send 200,000 pieces of mail to an area where 149,000 recipients were not interested. Now we're seeing response rates in the 15 to 20 percent range compared to a more typical 2 or 3 percent response. This is virtually unheard of in direct mail."
Like MapInfo, Microsoft MapPoint lets you group customers and prospects by demographic criteria and plot them onto color-coded maps. A built-in route planner and GPS navigation mode make it easy to map out territories and take this information on the road. The software can import customer data from a variety of sources, including Microsoft Access, Excel, Outlook, or SQL Server. Geographic and demographic plotting information comes from Claritas.
Whether you're opening a new location or brokering mergers and acquisition deals like Richard Vander Kaay & Associates in Newport Beach, California, identifying promising new business opportunities takes careful research. Vander Kaay uses OneSource Business Browser to watch market trends and get the inside line on more than 280,000 private and public U.S. companies. An annual subscription to OneSource costs up to $3,000 per seat for less than 50 seats. Business Browser is available as a Web service or can be integrated into your intranet.
"Our job is to identify people willing to have a conversation about the sale of a business," explains Vander Kaay. "The challenge is to generate a list of companies we can contact that are on target for the client we're working for." Combining keyword searches with SIC codes and demographic criteria helps Vander Kaay narrow the field. "If I'm conducting a project in the plastics arena, searching by SIC code will find everything from plastic hair pins to plastic bumpers. By using keywords and searching for manufacturers of plastic hairpins, then selecting by size, location, and revenue, we can find the best match," he says. Reviewing the corporate history, financials, and executive leadership of a company prior to approaching it helps Vander Kaay craft a compelling pitch and ups the odds of closing the deal.
Factiva offers another way to stay abreast of your field—and one step ahead of the competition. A joint venture between Dow Jones and Reuters, Factiva puts breaking news, market reports, and corporate summaries at your fingertips from nearly 8,000 global newspapers, news wires, trade journals, newsletters, magazines, and Web sites. Saved searches and tracking tools help you keep tabs on specific companies as well as on news and trends. You can sort results by relevance or date, and a More Like This feature instantly locates similar articles.
The cost of Factiva subscriptions varies based on which resources you use and how many employees use it. The license fee for 100 users, for example, is about $150 per user per month. You can also do individual searches for $2.95 per downloaded article. Factiva's intranet version lets you pull relevant news and documents directly into your company database.
