5 simple ways to create an online business map for your startup

You’ve got a great business model. You’re offering the kind of product or service people will absolutely love and, more importantly, pay money to receive. You know how to practice outstanding customer service. You’re ready to make some money.

And yet, all of that won’t matter if customers can’t find your place of business. The simple fact of the matter for brick-and-mortar stores is that if people can’t find your location, they’ll just go out of their way to visit one of your competitors. That’s a disaster for your small business.

Aside from simply helping customers find your location, a good business map can also be used to help your sales team strategise individual territories or potential areas for expansion.

However, knowing where to start when creating a business map, especially one that will look good, can be tricky. Fortunately, there are many simple tools that can help.

1. Google Maps for Work

Sometimes, the optimal solution is right in front of our eyes.

Google is arguably the No. 1 name in the Internet space. It’s used by millions of people daily for search queries. It also offers countless other applications for a variety of business uses.
One of those applications is Google Maps for Work. This analytics tool allows you to see how people visiting your website interact with your maps. You can learn how many prefer the satellite view, where they zoom to, and how they use the map.

Why is that important? Because it enables you to customize the map to meet the needs of your target market. You can also use Google Maps for Work to tailor-fit your map to the majority of the people who visit your site.

2. Map Business Online

Map Business Online offers a variety of business mapping services, including business and location intelligence, market analysis, color coding, call planning with optimized routing and Excel data mapping.

The business web-maps feature allows you to see geocoded customer locations, as well as where your competition is located. That way you’ll be able to determine how many prospects are in an area as well as the level of market saturation.

This tool also offers the option to build sales territories and appoint members of your sales team to specific locations. You can use geographic units, such as zip codes or counties, to identify regions and ensure there is no overlap.

3. Maptive

Maptive is another great tool for mapping your business. It provides you with a variety of map tools that enable you to draw sales territories, optimize routes, filter location data and calculate travel distances.

Maptive allows you to use Google Maps to customise your location data. It includes customisable markers, as well as optional description displays, a legend or a search box.
If your map is being created for sales purposes, you can save it as a private map, as opposed to making it public to everyone.

4. Maptitude

Maptitude offers the Create-a-Map Wizard, which provides full lifecycle assistance for locating, analysing and mapping your important business data. With just a few simple steps, you can locate people in your target market, color-code sales regions, and build bands around your locations.

Maptitude also offers powerful database integration that enables you to add business intelligence to an existing map. You can then add themes, labels and display your own data tables side-by-side against map data.

5. Business Analyst Online

Esri produces an excellent business mapping tool called Business Analyst Online. It gives you the opportunity to perform market analysis and create maps in just a few minutes. Furthermore, the application provides insights about businesses and people in specific locations.

BAO lets you generate color-coded maps based on any number of thousands of variables you believe are relevant to your business model. You can also refine your view by filtering specific data ranges.

What tools do you use for sales strategising and business mapping? Tell us in the comments section below.