Specialist advice
Postcode lottery
Discover how good postcode planning prevents poor performance and maximise return
Making a success of a franchise opportunity is often closely linked to where a business is established and how you can realise the potential of your available territory. Over the years, many franchise businesses have used the UK's postcode system to provide a reliable blueprint for this vital strategic planning, and have designed everything from territory maps to sales and marketing efforts based on postcodes.
But how much insight can current postcode data actually provide and how can you use it to help you business succeed? As the UK's postcode system passes its 50th anniversary, John Taylor, Managing Director of Geoplan, looks at how franchisors and their partners can use the system to assess business opportunities, plan activity and maximise return.
From the very beginning, where a franchise opportunity may be little more than an idea, postcodes can be used to assess and define a territory and its market potential depending on what the business actually does. This could be a myriad of diverse requirements from identifying very particular consumer-focused profiles such as houses with gardens at one end of the scale to identifying specific business types at the other. The availability of data is as varied as the types of franchise opportunities out there, so even if you only want to target garage-based business within a specific territory, for instance, postcode data can help franchisors build a business case.
But territory planning should not just focus on what business opportunity exists in a specific area - it's also possible to use postcodes to reduce the overall effort required to cover a given territory, via efficient planning and reduced travel time. For instance, it should allow planners to allocate appropriately sized sales teams and give them the option to allocate more time on the ground to be spent with customers, rather than just ensuring a territory has been covered.
It's also important not just to view postcodes and their use in isolation. Franchises can potentially gain a great deal of insight by looking at their own customer data alongside postcode information, so if you have a regional or local demographic drawn from your own sales efforts or previous experience, overlaying the specific trends and patterns available from postcode data can allow businesses to understand why certain sales patterns are occurring (or even more importantly, why they are not). It's even possible to take into consideration issues such as a carbon footprint, ecological and corporate social responsibility.
You can feed this data into the planning and execution of marketing campaigns, where more precision will almost always equate to more effective marketing spend. The franchisor can then decide on appropriate media and marketing support as part of the package.
Once the franchise structure is mature franchisors find themselves confronted with helping the franchisee grow the business and generate the return from the territory. Some of the classic business challenges, which will be familiar to many franchise organisations, are often the result of an incomplete or inaccurate view of their territory and/or customer base.
Sometimes the franchise network has grown in an unstructured way and franchisees territories overlap or take business from each other. Inevitably, each franchisee will want the largest territory they can get their hands on, but sometimes they cannot service the area effectively. Postcode-driven systems can show where business is really coming from and can help both franchisee and franchisor in negotiating a different approach and reduced area to improve return, reduce effort and create new areas of opportunity for franchisees.
Equally, franchisors may need help to identify the most profitable customers or generate new business within the area. But a key underlying point to remember is that postcodes are constantly and rapidly changing and with this comes the challenge of changing contracted territories and market potential.
Geoplan Expert is a mapping system that helps Franchisors produce clear,
colour-coded and accurate maps for their business. It’s an invaluable
marketing tool for visualising data geographically via postcode boundaries.
For more information, visit: www.geoplan.com
Reader giveaway!
Geoplan has five Geoplan Expert software packages – worth £499 – to giveaway! To be in with a chance of winning, simply pop your details in an email to fnews@vmgl.com
