The Small Business Development Center has a new resource called the ESRI Business Analyst Online, which helps identify and analyze business opportunities.

The four components to analyzing business opportunities are:

  • Market Planning
  • Territory Design
  • Customer Segmentation
  • Marketing

Each component is designed to help you throughout the entire process of starting, enhancing, or expanding a business. Following these simple steps will help you to make sure you and your business are on the right track to success. Your SBDC consultant can serve as your guide in this process.

Market Planning: Getting Started

Starting a business can be a confusing, and rather daunting task. Using Business Analyst helps translate a wide variety of information about business and marketing into easy, accessible information that can be understood by all audiences.

No matter where you are in the business process, Business Analyst gives an overview of:

  • Sales
  • Target customers
  • Market opportunity
  • Representations of data (maps, graphs, statistics, etc.)

Find Locations

Through quickly generated visuals showing locations and competitor locations, Business Analyst will help you analyze:

  • Demographics
  • Drive time (time of day when people commute by time)
  • Sales volume
  • Property costs
  • Where to build
  • Remodeling
  • Relocating

Analyze Markets

Provided tools and Wizards will help you explore and share your options to enhance informed decision making by generating standard models and analyses.

*The SBDC can help you interpret information, statistics, graphs, reports, etc. to help you form a better understanding of the above material.

Territory Design: Picking the Right Place for Your Business

The Territory Design feature of ESRI’s Business Analyst provides you with everything you need to know about market placement, and helps improve the success of every location, franchise, sales agent, and service or delivery route. The Territory Design Tool can help you:

  • Identify overlapping districts and relocate effectively
  • Prioritize and make territories stable
  • Make more compact territories to reduce travel time and expenses
  • Benchmark performance

Automate Territory Creation

Business Analyst saves you time by combining your sales and customer data with ESRI’s updated business and consumer data for you.

*The SBDC can help you interpret information, statistics, graphs, reports, etc. to help you form a better understanding of the above material.

Customer Segmentation: Targeting Customers

ESRI’s Tapestry Segmentation gives you an in-depth look into consumer lifestyles, which is vital to success. It also classifies neighborhoods into segments based on characteristics such as socioeconomic and demographic data.

Customer segmentation can help determine:

  • Where to build or expand
  • Where and how to market
  • What product/services will fill specific niches

 Compare Markets

With Business Analyst, you can compare county, state, and national demographic averages, as well as generate maps and reports with consumer spending behavior indexes.

Identify Where Your Best Prospects Are

With Tapestry, you can classify and find profitable customers. Viewing this data on a map can give insight about how well customers are being served by you and your competitors, as well as insights about lifestyles, preferences, and spending habits of consumers.

*The SBDC can help you interpret information, statistics, graphs, reports, etc. to help you form a better understanding of the above material.

Marketing: You’ve Started a Business; Now What?

Location information, like sales and consumer behavior, helps you to decide:

  • What to advertise in certain locations
  • Who to advertise to in certain locations
  • Where to increase in-store promotions
  • Where to sponsor events

Because social media and electronic communication are on the rise, understanding location is very important to marketing. ESRI Business Analyst can help you harness and use this data to your advantage.

Increase Effectiveness of Marketing Investments

Through Tapestry Segmentation, Business Analyst can help you:

  • Understand your targeted consumers
  • Create memorable messages and advertisements
  • Deliver messages and advertisements through social media

Seeing this data on a map will refine market strategy and promote overall good use of market dollars.

How the Small Business Development Center Can Help

ESRI’s Business Analyst provides tools and data needed for accurate detailed market analysis, such as demographics and spending habits. Business Analyst Online uses over 5,000 variables and the data can be analyzed in a geographical context as specific as block groups and zip codes.

The Small Business Development Center can provide you with all of this information, and can help you fully understand how to use this information.

The SBDC can also provide you with Print-Ready Reports and Maps specific to your location, and generate Customer Comparison reports.

Customer Comparison Reports can:

  • Compare prospective sites for a new location
  • Benchmark sites against a successful existing location or geography
  • View comparison charts and tables on income, population, and household variables
  • Compare multiple trade areas and their demographics

Overall, the Small Business Development Center can help you with every component of starting, and provide you with the information you need to be successful.

Contact the SBDC at (434) 395-2086 for an appointment today.