New concepts remain the lifeblood of the retail and restaurant industries.
But as an emerging business, you’re more than likely facing many big decisions and challenges, some of which you haven’t anticipated no matter how experienced you are.
For instance, you know you can effectively operate your current locations and you know it’s time to expand your footprint, but which location should you open next?
How do you maximize your territory development, while avoiding the classic pitfall of opening an unsuccessful location?
Find Your Customers
When determining how and where to grow, the single most important factor in the process is not finding the right real estate – it’s finding the right customers.
While that statement may surprise you, look around. Today’s retail landscape is littered with failed concepts that believed if they built it, customers would come.
If there aren’t enough customers to generate the revenue needed to pay the bills, a stellar location – regardless of access and visibility – will fail.
Real estate will impact performance only if you have enough customers or potential customers willing to walk into your store or restaurant in the first place.
Setting Your Sites for Growth
Customer data and analytic insights are essential to market optimization and successful real estate expansion.
By combining customer insights with today’s analytic technology, it becomes possible to create a customer profile that identifies your best customers, shows you where they live and where to find other potential customers just like them.
Based on that customer profile, you can pinpoint trade areas with significant clusters of your best customers, showing you how many core customers live in a specific trade area and quantifying the value of each customer in terms of dollars.
Predicting what each household will be worth to the store or restaurant allows you to compare potential sites with your existing locations based on the proximity of your core customers to each site – which lets you to quickly analyze the quality of any location under consideration.
That gives you a good idea of where to open a new unit and, just as importantly, where not to open one.
The Bottom Line
As new and emerging retailers seek to make their mark on a crowded marketplace, customer analytics can help your brand stand out.
Every company is unique, every customer is unique and ever situation is unique. By tailoring the power of data and analytics specifically for your concept, you can quantify your true potential.
There’s no substitute for a solution that enables you to profile your best customers, find more just like them, and open up homerun locations every time.
Talk to us today about how our analytic solutions can help you find your next perfect location and answer your most important growth questions.