Catchment analysis is centered on understanding how the local community interacts with your store locations, allowing you to better understand - and sell to - your customers. Below, we cover how to leverage catchment analysis to perfect your marketing efforts, helping you acquire, retain, and engage your customers.
To get the most from catchment analysis, you’ll need to rely on high-quality point of interest (POI). We’ll cover what it is and the best ways to use it for your local marketing efforts.
To start, let’s cover catchment analysis, and explore why it’s so useful for marketing.
Catchment analysis is the process of examining catchment areas for your store locations. Catchment areas are the areas around your business from which you draw customers, and help you understand customer behavior. In catchment analysis, you will analyze trade areas for your store locations.
The end goal of catchment analysis is to have a clear picture of where your customers come from and who they are. With demographics information such as home addresses, age, income, education levels, and more, you can get a good idea of your main audience, allowing you to better serve them, as well as target new locations.
Catchment analysis will show you the coverage of your store locations, revealing any gaps and overlaps. You can use this to inform where to open new locations, close existing locations in underperforming areas, and expand locations to better serve the most successful trade areas.
Catchment marketing is the process of determining and carrying out your marketing strategy based on the insights you gather from your catchment analysis. This allows you to build a local marketing strategy rooted in customer behavior around your store locations.
When done properly, it allows you to more effectively market to your customers and save effort and money on wasted marketing materials. The more you know about your customers, the better you can target your audience with marketing, ads, offers, and messaging, helping you drive more traffic and improve conversions!
Catchment analysis, by nature, is a method of local analysis and marketing, as it centers on specific store locations. Since catchment area analysis lets you understand where store visitors come from and who they are, it’s specific to the trade area of your store.
In all cases, trade area analysis will allow you to more effectively market to and serve your customers. With more information on demographics and where your customers come from, you can save on marketing resources and better cater your marketing campaigns to those customers.
We cover the best ways to use catchment analysis to improve your local marketing:
To gain the full benefits of catchment area analysis, you need to effectively integrate it into your overall marketing strategy and process. Be sure to consider how you will implement your analysis into your marketing efforts, including how to develop and distribute content using what you’ve learned about your customers.
Below, we help you integrate catchment analysis into your marketing strategy to gain traction and conversions.
The main benefit is the information you gather about your customers, including key demographics and brand affinity characteristics. These will be big drivers in determining your marketing preferences and activities, allowing you to leverage your efforts for best results. This can be used to create better marketing materials, but also save on overproducing marketing materials and distributing them to areas where they are unlikely to gain traction.
Ultimately, this lets you maximize the value of the marketing materials that you produce, allowing you to gain the most growth and conversions.
Beyond serving your existing customers better, good catchment analysis allows you to find new customers that you were missing. Identify key demographic and brand affinity characteristics that can influence their marketing preferences, and use this to better target your outreach to potential customers, helping you steal customers from your competitors.
Using the insights from your catchment analysis, you can develop a personalized marketing approach. Create tailored ads, offers, coupons, notifications, and messaging to better target your known customers based on personas. This will garner more traction, allowing you to gain new customers and retain existing customers more effectively.
Now that you know what catchment marketing is and how to use catchment analysis to inform your marketing efforts, you can start using these strategies to gain new customers, grow your business, and increase sales. For this to work, you need to use high-quality, reliable point of interest (POI) for the trade area under analysis.
SafeGraph’s Places provides insights about competitors, including business listings and proximity. With data enriched by demographics data, you’ll be able to analyze customer behavior and improve your coverage and outreach.
