Geography matters in business intelligence

Geography is a major part of business intelligence. As the folks at Environmental Systems Research Institute put it, "Geography Matters". In our work, "where" is often the first question. Who, what, why, how, and how much quickly follow, but "where" is usually central, along with the corollary, "how far?". For example,

• where to put the next store?
• where are the best customers or prospects?
• where are the competitors, and how far are they from your best performing stores?
• how far can the new sales territory boundaries be from the nearest distribution center?
• where are the high-value neighborhoods being under-served by your retail network
  

Check out this Wikipedia entry for a bunch of resources explaining how government, science, and business sees and uses geography, and how demographics relates to geography: where. The still curious will find a useful glossary of geography terms

Of course, who and how many are just as important. To get a start on these questions, visit www.DemographicsNow.com or check out the US Bureau of the Census population estimates page for a look at the Bureau's view of current population characteristics of the US and its geographic and political subdivisions.

DataWell® Provides Hassle-Free Best in Class Marketing DB and CRM Services

Market Intelligence Group's best-in-class hosted marketing database and campaign management system, DataWell®, helps many companies solve customer relationship management challenges. The web-based solution delivers immediate comprehensive customer knowledge and powerful business intelligence directly to the desktop without IT overhead.

OVERVIEW
Customer knowledge allows your company to approach marketing challenges proactively and effectively. DataWell’s® flexibility allows users to meet users' changing marketing data management needs. The intuitive interface allows marketers to quickly and easily begin using the system without any need for complex commands, programming experience or in-depth data expertise. DataWell® enables informed marketing decision making.

MARKETING DATABASE
DataWell is a marketing database allowing your company to manage crucial data including business line transactional data, survey data, demographic data, and other data sources.

Any dataset that can be provided electronically can be incorporated into DataWell. Users can quickly set the scope of marketing campaigns in DataWell, and use flexible point-and-click and drop down selections to set conditional criteria for campaign targets, including current customers and/or prospects.

CAMPAIGN MANAGEMENT
Use DataWell to do more than creating data sets for analysis and mail lists. DataWell includes a full campaign management system allowing users to track and manage specific campaigns. Document business line, product, offer, target audience, quantity mailed, expenses and more for use later in calculating ROI on the campaign. Calendar functions allow you to easily see and track all campaigns currently in the market place.

CAMPAIGN TRACKING
The combination of the marketing database and campaign management modules allows DataWell to create automatic performance reporting based upon the purchase history of the targeted households within a defined response period. Use DataWell to show response rates, gross sales, and commissions, LTV, or whatever KPIs meet the business need.

Intuitive charts even show the response curves for a campaign, giving marketers a deeper understanding of the real response period for any given campaign.

REPORTING & STATISTICAL ANALYSIS
Access to the breadth of data in DataWell is a benefit for any company. The ability to organize, report and analyze your own customer data provides real return and insight.

This is an Exciting Time for Business Intelligence

This is an exciting time for business intelligence. At least two developments offer enormous return on investment (and it does not have to be a huge investment). Web 2.0 technologies provide companies with opportunities to dive deeper into customer knowledge and to find the guidance they need for decision support. This can be quick e-mail surveys to test and tweak messaging before launching a campaign or gathering customer feedback on products and how they are used. New technology is allowing marketers to avoid mistakes and increase success. Also, data can now be quickly gathered and distributed via intelligent, Web-based dashboards. A large investment in people or hardware is not necessary to realize quick and actionable business intelligence.

The idea of this company is to bring all of the best tools and techniques for sophisticated data analysis and business intelligence to small and medium-sized businesses. Data mining is no longer done exclusively by the big companies. Market Intelligence Group has invested in developing the specific expertise, analysis tools and data visualization tools that enable small and medium-sized businesses to do the same.

As an analysis firm, we are using new media not necessarily to solicit the business intelligence but to deliver it. We are providing web-based tools that give instant access to business performance and intelligence down to the customer level—tracking what works and does not work. Generally speaking, all of our clients are embracing web-based tools that collect, organize and make sense of all of the data collected. Our clients want to focus on tools which communicate performance information directly, clearly, rapidly, and with proper context. They also want the information to be arranged in a way that logically supports their business process and focuses on what is currently happening vs. history.

While marketing has become more and more of a data-driven process, by no means has creativity or creative taken a back seat. In fact, being on-target with message is just as important as being on target with the audience; the message needs to resonate and communicate in a meaningful way. Getting noticed and creating share of mind with the correct prospects or customers in a highly fragmented media environment is a critical advantage for growing businesses. Research-driven marketing and better customer knowledge is now a necessary input to the creative process, and it supports relevant messaging. Knowing the buyer profile or their preferences goes a long way towards connecting.

The first question a company should be asking is: “What is the cost of failure?” When viewed within this context, business intelligence is generally a small investment overall; it can help avoid the failures and improve the chance for success for any businesss. In fact, business should be considered an investment that will build success, not an expense.