Market and audience planning

Understanding local market composition is crucial before entering a new area. It minimises investment risk when embarking on marketing campaigns, helping pinpoint outdoor advertising locations and which postal sectors to target. Comprehensive UK local area data, like Experian’s, provides local-market intelligence to better inform decision making, including pre-packaged demographic, market-behaviour, and supply and demand models along with outlet locations at postal sector and output area levels.

Unlocking local population trends can help you make longer-term decisions. Using available historical data, current data points and powerful analytics enables you to drive future demographic estimates, while segmentation data assists with assessing how these trends compare to those in rest of the UK population. Combining local knowledge with a broader UK-wide outlook like this offers the right balance to make strategic decisions for your business.

If you only have limited first-party data insights, leveraging external data sources, such as market research or other dynamic data sources, could enable you to create and maintain an evolving view of your ideal customer profile. Experian is well placed to help you with this type of data augmentation, which is also useful if you need deeper behavioural or consumer insights that can’t be easily extracted from demographic profiling. 

Successfully managing your property portfolio and effectively running existing developments doesn’t just happen. To prosper you need information about locations, relevant property data and insight into the local competition. A data provider, like Experian, can provide all the information you need to make the right decisions that can boost your investments.

If you’re engaged in property investment and developments, or you hope to be in the future, you need learn how to produce robust analysis of prime property sites. This will enable you to identify profitable locations for your projects and evaluate the demographic of local consumers and their level of expenditure. In some cases, it’s worth consulting experts to ensure you have the data and tools need to extract accurate assessments.

You need to keep abreast of changes in the retail sector to strengthen and future-proof your plans and drive competitive advantage. Analysis based on local area data and retail locations can underpin key decisions, including whether to open, close or rebrand your outlets or enhance your lettings’ marketing collateral. A solution that offers analytics, data and expertise is ideal. Experian’s even offers easy-to-follow reports on over 3,000 shopping areas in the UK and Ireland. 

Property and physical location planning aren’t confined to the private sector. Public sector organisations also need information to inform their retail planning, access economic development needs and decide where to allocate resources effectively. Experian has long experience of helping public sector bodies with these decisions and has even offered data for use in education, including assisting geography departments with key elements of the curriculum.

Who are you selling to? You might be confident about your target clientele in one location, but you can’t assume the insight that has driven your success in one region will apply to new territories. Part of the process is understanding where consumer spending power is and it pays to study your new customers before making investments. Consider creating segmentation that includes traits shared by your local customers and characteristics that are unique to your new audience.

Areas of poverty and affluence can sometimes be located alongside one another – in some cases, they’re just a few metres apart. Cutting-edge data and analysis tools allow you to zoom right in to evaluate small neighbourhoods at a micro level – rather than viewing broad homogenised areas. Experian’s solution superimposes a grid over the world, inviting you to examine demographics for each 250m x 250m square.

As well as understanding market differences at a local, micro level, you also need to be able to zoom out and compare strategies and trends across countries. To do this, you need to have up-to-date and consistent data. A good data partner will have robust processes in place to verify data sources and can help you extract the right insights from them, using visualisation and advanced analytics. This could include creating bespoke data models and segmentation.

Global expansion is a dream for many organisations, but the decision to open new offices, stores or fulfilment centres requires thorough research. Where should you invest? Which country, city or town is right for you? How does the market compare with your current locations? And how big is the opportunity? These are all critical questions, but having access to accurate data and extracting the right insights can give you the answers.