Utilise understanding of target audience and external data to optimise decisions. Discover where your target audience congregates and apply external additional data to spot the best locations in the areas of your target audience dominance.
A step-by-step guide on how to find the best locations by placing assets where your target audience is:
1. Locate your target audience
Discover the presence of your target audience in the predefined potential locations, or vice versa, find potential locations where your target audience is. With CHAOS Population Structure dashboard, you can quickly perform a search for the group of your interest and locate areas with the presence of your target audience. Take advantage of CHAOS forecasts and check the distribution of target audience in the future.
If you are targeting households rather than individuals, Advanced Household Types dashboard offers similar Target customer search functionality where presence of different types of households can be examined in different locations.
2. Observe long-term changes in population structure in the selected areas and surroundings
Apart from the postcode areas with a large presence of your target customers, you can observe how the structure of the population has been evolving and what changes are expected in the future.
Moreover, you can use our high resolution data (250x250m grid) in Finland to find high density spots, households, income and other variables within your postcode areas of interest.
3. Analyse footfall (people volume) activity scores
Footfall is an anonymised and standardised people count estimated as the amount of unique mobile devices detected within grid cells and represented as Activity Score. The footfall information is provided at different time spans - representing averaged activity over the period.
With Footfall dashboard, you can find activity spots in your selected potential locations. Enrich the analysis further with services from our Service Mix dashboard to get more context on why activity is high. Having footfall information at different time spans enables not only finding big commercial or transit hubs with year-round activity, but also seasonal (summer peaks), or weekly activity patterns.
With a filter grid based on activity score, you can quickly locate grids with the same or higher activity score that could have the potential for a new location.
4. Examine service offerings and competitors
Next, it is possible to look at areas from a service provision perspective, analysing competitors, density and diversity. High density and diversity of services with high footfall activity score typically indicates a vibrant commercial centre. Looking at the transportation category it is possible to see if the spot is also a large public transport hub that can expand the catchment area significantly.
With CHAOS you can quickly glance at what competitors are present in the locations. We developed a competitiveness score for cafes, restaurants, and bars to evaluate the amount of competition faced in location. Having the competition score allows quick screening and comparison of multiple potential locations.
One can also check presence of competitors outside retail sector and public services from Office Market tenant search.
5. Analyse reachability
Analyse if existing locations already cover the potential one by reachability.
You can also consider what is the catchment area of your business and whether your existing and potential locations can affect each other. You can observe what are the other attractors that would bring potential customers within your catchment area, or what are the competitors within the reachability from your locations.
Take advantage of demographics within selected reachability area from the potential location. Consider the demographics living and working within a certain reachability. Considering the presence of competition within the same reachability, you can make predictions on what share of local residents and workers can be converted as your customers.
