Off the Shelf Small Business Mapping Software

All small businesses can benefit from inexpensive off the shelf CD Rom mapping software. If you own a business you need to where your customers are coming from, where you would like to expand your sphere of influence to, where your competitors are located and how to route your delivery vehicles. We recommend the following companies and CD ROM mapping software:

Rand McNally

Business Map

Delorma USA Map

Etak Maps

By printing a selection of nine maps at street level and taping them together you can get a pretty good indication of the area, you can then draw circles at 5 and ten mile radius to see where 80% of your business is most likely coming from. Etak relief maps show hills, mountains and elevations along with roads, highways, schools, libraries, post offices, government buildings, etc. Residential curvy roads usually indicate foothill areas or higher income areas (often both). Grid type residential areas near highways, freeways or railroad tracks indicate lower income areas. You can most likely pin-point your best customers and find the clusters so you know where to spend your marketing dollars or even get off your butt and walk door to door asking for their business.

If you are unsure of an area, which may be either commercial or residential simply click on a street, find a point and an address will display. Then click on all corresponding addresses. If a dot appears by most of the names, that indicates a business area. This area will be highlighted as a primary target area on the map.

By using Select-A-Map, we can cross-reference with fax numbers and know exactly where these faxes are located. We can also print out a list of every street considered business, commercial, industrial or retail in ascending address order. This is an incredible marketing tool. Nobody we have encountered is this heavy into the high tech front end marketing as we are. They just don't get it. They don't teach this in schools or universities yet. They would have to rewrite all the textbooks and get new professors. So much for tenure.

Look if you are not using these most basic tools you are missing out, because if you have sophisticated competition they already are. Think about it.

"Lance Winslow" - If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs

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