Lost In a Box is Back

Last year we partnered with The Edge in their cool location based competition Lost In a Box. As we blogged at the time, it was hugely successful with over 3 and a half million page impressions over 3 weeks in over 200,000 unique browser sessions. This proves what we have been saying for so long, that people love location based competitions.

This year The Edge came back to us and said they want to do it again and we were delighted to partner with them on Lost in a Box 2. By the look of the map it is even more popular this time as they add new concepts, including hiding 2 people in the box instead of one.

We’ll be looking forward to seeing Lost in a Box 2 break new records for engagement and have enjoyed participating with this campaign.

So if you haven’t tried it already, why not go and check it out yourself?

If you have any questions about how to use location in your next campaign, please contact us.

How to Get Listed on New Zealand Car Navigation Systems

I noticed that over the weekend someone had located our blog by searching on Google with the query “How to get listed on Car navigation systems”. I’m glad you asked and equally glad you found us because the answer if very easy.

GeoSmart provides the mapping information and Points of Interest (places to go) for the major car navigation brands in New Zealand including Navman, TomTom, Garmin Asus, Metroview and more. In addition to this, we also provide data for lots of other services including cartography and web mapping. The most popular web site we provide data for is AA Maps, which has huge traffic both domestic and international due to the affiliation of the NZ Automobile Association with other motoring associations around the world, so many tourist coming to NZ plan their NZ travel on that site. There are many more of course and some of these are showcased on our home page.

We are also finding many new clients in the mobile space, developing applications for iPhone and Android. They also use Points of Interest, so if you list with us you are very likely, if relevant to find your details on those applications as well, again at no charge to you.

So lets keep this simple. All you need to do is go to either the GeoSmart home page and click on the link:

Or go to the AA Maps home page and click on the icon that looks like this:

Simply follow the instructions that follow, which will allow you to quickly and easily add your business to our database for free.

You will have the ability to accurately identify the location of your business and chose from a selection of categories that represent your business, which is frequently multiple categories. For example a restaurant may also be a cafe and a take away. We will then validate your listing to ensure that you are authorised to make the entry on our database. Your data will then quickly be added to our data which is then updated by our clients and partners including the major car nav brands.

You will also be given the option of a free dynamic map with pan and zoom tools that you can post on your website for free. If people want driving directions to your location they can enter their starting address and be guided via AA Maps with full printable turn by turn directions and maps and even be able to check the real time traffic conditions before they go. All we ask in return is that you log onto your page and ensure your data is up to date at least once a year.

What if you are a chain? No problem, as long as you are authorised to represent your business, you can add as many of your business locations as you wish. Hopefully as a chain, we already have your data, but you may have new branches that we haven’t been told about, or some may have moved location, so please check on the AA Maps website to confirm we have all your current info.

Now that you will be listed on car navigation and in other applications, you can let people know in person, on your website, newsletters and other material, how they can find you. We look forward to helping send business your way.

Air New Zealand Freeway Picks GeoSmart Maps

Air New Zealand are running a very cool promotion to promote their new Air New Zealand Rental Cars service. They have set up 2 rental cars, one called Jeffree in the North Island and one called Freeona on The Mainland. Members of the public can register here to go in the draw to win a week’s free rental car, together with a Telecom Garmin Asus Android Mobile which of course uses GeoSmart Car Navigation Maps and AA Traffic by GeoSmart.

As part of the promotion, the vehicle is tracked and the location in shown on a GeoSmart Map on the website, together with photos and blog comments from the lucky people while on their journey.

This promotion will go for sometime, so do register and join the fun. GeoSmart is delighted to partner with Air New Zealand and some other great brands in this fun campaign.

Cartography and Maps for Your Advertising Campaign

As a mapping company we do all sorts of work, and if you are in New Zealand you probably have a printed map that we created at home or in your car. We produce printed maps for the NZ Automobile Association, for Wises, for Yellow, for the NZ Motorhome and Caravan Association and many more. We produce map books, sheet maps, travel atlas, advertising directories  and lots more.

Another area of our business is custom map creation. We have a huge database of information about New Zealand (and other countries including Australia) and frequently produce either digital map data or printed map data on our plotters on demand. We often produce map data for use on web sites, printed advertising, flyers, posters, Point of Sale and so on. We can produce data in most formats, optimised to the size desired.

There is a catch and that is that we have peak times and times when we struggle to deal with any additional work, such as when new annual map books, tourist guides, tourist maps etc are scheduled, so to avoid disappointment, it does pay to get in early. Our peak season starts around June, so if you need maps for a current promotion, now is a good time to talk to us about it.

So if you need anything to do with maps and map data for your next campaign, event, publication, conference, advertisement, contact us now. We’d love to help.

NZ Travel Atlas

Analysing Car Sales Using Web Map Part 2

Last week I blogged about analysing your car sales (picking an industry at random) from a dealership on a map. I looked at comparing sales between reps by looking at where the clients lived on a map.

The concept is that we have a rich amount of data about our customers, especially when it is large ticket items and their are warranty and other ongoing commitments, not to mention the desire for repeat business. I used examples such as gender, personal or business use, age group, whether there was a trade in and so on. There is of course a lot more information available and there are also of course KPI’s. Please note that in order to do the things I’m talking about, you do not need expensive GIS software or specialist engineers. You already have the people you need, although in some cases an external consultant may help you see things from a fresh perspective.

Selling high ticket items like cars, real estate, quality furniture and furnishings is a tough business, especially in New Zealand and Australia. It’s competitive and the industries also have high staff turnover meaning that personal relationships are likely to be lost. This means that business intelligence and the ability to data mine becomes a lot more important. But at the risk of playing a broken record, finding useful information from your CRM or accounting software other than basic information is difficult. Now most companies in these industries have done business a certain way for many years and often the sales people go from one company to the next, staying in the industry and reinforce the concepts that this is the way the industry does it and we know the industry.

Our focus takes a different tack. These industries have leaders who swim against the current and use whatever technology or new ideas they can find. Are the over achievers or sales champions working harder? I would argue that most of them are working smarter rather than harder. The difference is that they look for ways to work smarter, whereas the other 95% plus use what they are given. The fact that you are reading this blog puts you in the top 10%. I’ve been told that in the industries I’m writing about here, the Pareto Principle is actually way out. They say that the best business is actually done by less than 5% of the sales people.

So what can you do as a company to improve your odds? How about trying something different? Let us help you find the low hanging fruit that has been eluding you. Lets use some business intelligence and move on. Now ideally what I am talking about would start at Head Office with the Sales Manager, Marketing Manager, Financial Controller or perhaps all of the above. Who is motivated to increase your profitability and productivity? How can you make it easy for your branches or dealerships to improve their performance?

In the last blog we talked about measuring performance at the dealership level, by the dealership. I’ve been in those offices and seen sales people going through the accounting system looking for people or companies whose leases are about to expire, or who last made a purchase 3-5 years ago and making prospecting phone calls. I’ve seen them cold calling using Yellow Pages or other directories. I’ve attended some of the sales meetings as a guest and seen the white board which shows the branch budget by model, the sales to date for the month and the stressed looks on the faces of all involved whose income and livelihood depend on achieving those targets. It’s very seat of the pants and very reactive.

Imagine if at head office, you could provide the dealerships with business intelligence that increased branch sales nationally. If you could give them information that allowed them to increase productivity and profitability and at the same time increase your brand market share. Wouldn’t it be nice to achieve the KPI’s you or the manufacturers are setting? Selling the cars (or whatever your product is) that have the higher margins, or perhaps more accessories which carry that extra margin.

How? I’m sorry but I’m going to tease you here. Have a look through the previous blogs here because a lot of the information I have to share works across multiple industries. Bookmark this page because I am going to write Part 3 of Analysing Car Sales Using Web Map some time in the next few days and give you some specific examples. Where are your potential low hanging fruit? Do you want to pick them? Jump on the school bus and drive through the opposition.

Drive through the opposition

Of course you can also contact us and discuss how we can help you or ask for a demonstration. You can also email me directly. We would also like to hear from business and franchise consultants looking to add tools to their toolbox.

Also please feel free to leave a comment or ask any questions here on the blog, we welcome your feedback.

Analysing Car Sales Using WebMap Part 1

This can apply to any segment, but lets use car sales as an example today. Lets imagine you are Sales Manager for a car dealership. You have a budget to achieve and you need to understand what is going on in your territory. You have 6 sales people, each has a unit and dollar budget and you have a budget for each model of car you have on offer.

You have got some excellent sales history, because you are selling big ticket items and you know where the people live who purchased your cars. Using the GeoSmart Business Visualisation Application you can see the locations of all the cars sold in December.

Small Car Sales

In this example, you are looking at small engine car sales from your dealership in an area of Auckland’s North Shore. This already shows you that you seem to have made sales in clusters of area, but there are other areas where you haven’t made sales of this class of vehicle.

Now lets think about other things you can do. First we can also overlay in different colours, car sales for December of your other models. You can display each model’s sales in a different colour. Now you may start to see some change, you may see that you get clusters of SUV or high end sedan sales in other areas, or you may still see gaps.

Another thing you can do as a separate view is look at all sales by one of your sales people on the map. In the same way as you did with the car models, you can assign each sales person a colour and display their sales on the map at the same time. You may again see some interesting things. Maybe one sales person is getting more sales in a particular area. He may be using a referral technique that the others can learn from. I’m being simplistic and generalist here, but there is always going to be a reason for the results you are getting and these reasons are often impossible to find using spreadsheets and tables on their own.

Another query you could run is viewing car sales per sales person by model, comparing them with other sales people per model on the map.

Given that you have sales history for each month, you could do the same sort of thing by visualising the above information by date. Assign a different colour to each month and you can then view each map and see if you can spot any trends. In your financial systems you have a wealth of information and we provide the ability to query that information and display in on the map. For example, some of the things you might query are:

• Gender of the purchaser?
• Age Group?
• Have they purchased from you before?
• What was their last car? Same brand or change? Larger or smaller?
• Was there a trade in?
• Was it a profitable sale?
• Was it for work or personal use?

The industry produces statistics each month. The latest reports on the AA Website say that the top selling model for December 2010 was the Toyota Corolla, but also interesting was that second was Toyota Hilux and third was Holden Commodore. So we have small to medium sized cars as most popular, but light commercials coming second and larger sedans coming third. Obviously there is much more to it and the dealership will have much more intelligence. The key here is whether the same trend is happening in your area and how you can capitalise on that knowledge, something I will look at in further blogs.

If this is of interest, please subscribe, or bookmark this blog and if you know anyone to whom this is of interest, why not send them a link. In business we all have a wealth of reports, but it is very easy to suffer death by statistics. There is an old adage that a picture speaks a thousand words and maps are a great way of delving into your business data to find knowledge that may otherwise remain hidden.

If you have questions, or would like to know more, please feel free to contact us.

Franchise Territory Mapping Part 2 with Demographics

A couple of days ago I blogged about using our new territory mapping application. In a business to consumer environment a powerful component is understanding who your target customers are.

One franchise industry I talked about was lawn mowing. One of the features of our new application is that it integrates the Department of Statistics Census Mesh Blocks. A mesh block is the smallest geographical unit in New Zealand and Australia and these can be spatially interrogated on the basis of a number of key questions asked in the Census which typically occurs every five years.

Meshblocks can vary in size from zero population to around 500 people and the information contained can be very powerful for decision makers if you ask the right questions.

So lets stick with the lawn mowing example for a bit. What sort of people would pay someone else to mow their lawns. Now I’m not in that business, but here are some thoughts. I would start with people who are time poor and have a reasonably high household income. Home ownership might be another criteria.

Our application will allow you to do your own queries within the Census data and we can even provide you with a list of all the street addresses within a meshblock that you identify as being a good target for marketing, so you can do some smart target marketing.

If you know the target demographics for your franchise business, our application will make it easy for you to determine the size of the franchise territories.

I’ve created a little example here to illustrate. Here we have a hypothetical lawn mowing franchise territory on Auckland’s North Shore. Using the GeoSmart Census Query Tool I have looked for mesh blocks within the territory using actual 2006 NZ Department of Statistics data. I’m looking for low hanging fruit, i.e. a demographic that I think would be easy to sell lawn mowing services to and probably other services if appropriate such as landscaping and general garden maintenance. I queried looking for mesh blocks which have a combined annual household income above $85,000 and greater than 85% of dwellings are occupied by their owners.

Owner Occupied high household income

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Would you agree that these mesh blocks would be a good area to target if I want to grow my business? So what next? Subscribe to this blog for more ideas, or bookmark it and come back for another look.

 

 

 

Franchise Territory Mapping Part 1

A few days ago I blogged about a new application we are launching soon which will allow you to create business territories in a Software as a Service (SaaS) environment. The great thing about this is that it doesn’t require the installation of any software, all you need is a web browser and an account.

Location based business analytics usually requires expensive GIS software and people with GIS experience to operate. One of the concepts we are big on at GeoSmart Maps is providing access to this type of technology to any business people who need information, without requiring specialist skills. By providing solutions like this, Route2GO route optimisation and others in a browser environment all you really need is business expertise and the desire to improve business efficiency and profit.

The franchise industry is of course about location and often involves creating territories, which are then licensed to the franchisee. Key concerns about these territories is that they offer a viable business opportunity and are priced according to the potential earning capacity and customer base. The GeoSmart solution makes it easy to do this. First of all, creating a territory is as simple as clicking with your mouse to create a polygon covering the area of the territory. Territories can be ‘snapped’ to each other so that boundaries can align perfectly.

Where a territory comes with existing clients, they can be displayed on the map and an associated table can provide the ability to display a count of existing clients and related tabular information, which can contain any required information that can be uploaded from the accounting package, CRM or franchise software.

For example if it was a lawnmowing franchise, it could display and list each customer with their address, frequency of mowing, the dollar value per job, whether there payments are up to date, how the customer was acquired and how long they have been a client and so on. It might show the last date the client was serviced, or the next date that their lawn is due for mowing.

Within the application, Boolean queries can allow the franchisee or franchisor to visualise their clients on the web map based on the criteria in the tables. For example you could display all clients on the map that are due for mowing and use this to plan which clients to visit today. You could view the most profitable customers on a map.

You could view customers by acquisition method which could be valuable for marketing purposes, displaying all clients who responded to print advertising, letter box flyers or word of mouth recommendations. This could be analysed to identify not only what methods of marketing work,  differences by neighbourhood. It is amazing how visualising information on a map can highlight information that you may not notice when looking at reports and spreadsheets.

Franchise territory mapping can be a major asset to the franchise industry, helping people quickly and easily work on their business as well as in it. If this is of interest to you, please feel free to contact us and bookmark or subscribe to this blog where we will be providing more information on how to using territory mapping to improve your business.

Business Territory Mapping

Mapping Sales Territories has always been a fundamental component in business, usually involving printed sheet maps, marker pens and perhaps map pins. You don’t want modify the territories because its a messy or painstaking job. It’s relatively one dimensional, you can’t show everything you want to be able to see, which limits the functionality and benefit you can achieve from it.

Territory management is of course very important and the map is only part of it. It allows you to delineate an area, usually to manage field workforces. It makes it easy for example if a potential client calls, to allocate resources to deal with an opportunity.

In the franchise business, the franchisee buys the rights to do business in a predefined area and the area has a value based partly on the land area, but really it is more about the number of potential clients in that area. Those clients might be other businesses, or it may be consumers. Of course the clients are then also categorised. For example if you are selling medical products for resale, your target clients are going to be pharmacies, medical practices etc. If you are offering lawn mowing or gardening services, your target market is consumers who can afford your services and perhaps are time poor.

GeoSmart is about to launch a SaaS web application which will allow you to not only create your business territories, but also to display existing potential clients, query population census demographic information from the New Zealand Department of Statistics and display that on the map and much more, as outlined in our end of year newsletter.This product will be available for New Zealand and Australia.

To learn more about this new application, please contact us or subscribe to this blog, where we will be exploring ways that you can analyse your business opportunities and results on a web map.

Creating Territories on a web map

GeoSmart adds Live Traffic Flow Data to AA Maps and Roadwatch online and TomTom Go Live

Over the last 8 months we have been building an environment that allows us to capture live traffic flow data from thousands of vehicles that are tracked using Fleet Management systems from our number of our business partners as part of our AA Traffic solution.  Over the last 4 years we have been refining web sites such as AA Maps and AA Roadwatch adding all sorts of web map features such as road conditions, accidents, road construction and maintenance, live airport timetables, live Cook Straight Ferry information and more.

This is a continuous work in progress, but today we have turned on our most exciting feature to date, which is live real time traffic flow and congestion data covering all major roads and arterials throughout New Zealand. You can view this exciting feature on both AA Maps and AA Roadwatch, simply by clicking on the Traffic drop down menu on the top right of the page and selecting Traffic Flow. You can then either zoom in on the map to the area of your choice or click on the traffic light icon to zoom in to the city of your choice.

The data you will be viewing will be up to date to within 5 minutes. This is going to become a very useful tool for motorists whether they are going on a trip, or simply heading out for business meetings, or off to a concert or sporting match. We have also made some other changes to this service, allowing you to selectively view incidents by a wider range of categories, which are:

• Reopened Roads. In the past it was easy to see when a road was closed, but not as intuitive when the road reopened. This is now a new category highly visible with its green icon.
• Critical Incidents
• Moderate Incidents has now separated
• Minor Incidents which were often road shoulder maintenance or situations that frequently didn’t seriously impact traffic flow

We have also added more webcams. There is a lot more happening in January February that I can’t tell you about yet, so keep an eye on our blog to find out more.

The other very cool thing that has happened is that due to the high quality of our AA Traffic by GeoSmart data TomTom has launched their Go Live 1000 and Go Live 1050 in New Zealand, the first country outside of Western Europe. This means that people who purchase these devices, which have a Vodafone SIM Card in them can get not only real time incident data, but also real time flow data on them. This is an amazing feature which will advise you of the expected time delay on your journey caused by traffic congestion and if appropriate offer you an alternate route. For those people who say they don’t need car nav because they know their way, they don’t know what the traffic is like ahead of them.