GPS Tracking For Business ROI — So Much More Than Saving Gas
Just a few days ago I published about my friend Rob Donat’s company, GPSInsight and the methods they used to help clients determine if serving certain customers or geographic areas was worth doing in business dollars and cents. In other words, finding the ROI for each customer.
Today I came across a company who really gets this idea, and they are smart enough to furnish a live US counties demographic demo … so go take a look at how you could use the “Power of Place” to make smart business decisions for your company.
The company, IDV Solutions has an on line tool that lets you look at various areas of the US at a county by county level and learn, at a glance about the demographics of the proposed place of doing business. Since the other tool I love talking about, Microsoft MapPoint easily let’s you track and route vehicles on a county-by-county, Zip Code, or user defined territory basis, you can do a million dollars worth of planning in just a few minutes.
Highly recommended. To get a better idea of why this is a great business tool let’s suppose you had a business in Denver, Colorado. You want to expand and you are looking at two popular, growing areas outside the city …Boulder County and Douglas County. You need no tool to see that these are popular areas, just follow the lumber trucks on their way to new home sites. But every product has a target audience. let’s suppose you want to target younger, well-off folks. Boulder ought to be a prime candidate, off the top of your head, because 
Boulder is known the world over as a popular “yuppie” sort of town. Before you make a commitment, go look at the demographics.
Hmm, Boulder has twice as many older residents pe
rcentage-wise as does Douglas County and the popular Castle Rock area. The average income in Douglas county is nearly twice that of Boulder county, too. Would you have known the balance was tipped that far in favor of Douglas county? Doubt it.
Of course if your product has any sort of political component, the whole situation shifts. Hard to find two counties as close as these two with such a difference in “red” and “Blue” voters. Guess that’s why a lot of my politically incorrect friends like to call it the “people’s Republic of Boulder”. You can learn a lot from a map … too bad our US schools treat geography as such a secondary “sawdust sandwich” subject.