- Ditch the old “ring around a trade area” way of finding your ideal customer base. This methodology is flawed, as it doesn’t take into account the real-life travel patterns of consumers and workers. Furthermore, factors like bodies of water, lack (or availability) of public transportation, and traffic flows can have a significant impact on who can conveniently access a specific retail location. For more information on trade areas, read How to Calculate “Trade Area” in 2021.
- Avoid using only home addresses in figuring out your trade area. Depending on the type of business, people are willing to travel for certain purchases and services, but not everyone is coming from home.
- Don’t look at population density alone. This may be killing your site selection evaluation. As the following chart illustrates, relying just on the population that lives and works in a specific area can be highly misleading.
Instead of merely looking at population density, we now have access to a wide range of hyper-local and powerful mobile data that tells you:
- What consumers are searching for and where
- How they are walking and driving every hour of every day and day of the week
- Demographics of individual shoppers and diners
- In-store behaviors
- Spending potential per consumer
