Thematic maps are a powerful yet often underutilized tool that can provide diverse businesses with meaningful location-based insights. By leveraging different types of thematic maps, organizations can better understand key metrics like sales performance, customer concentrations, and market opportunities across their territories.
This article will explore the definition of thematic maps, several commonly used types, and how businesses can create effective maps to enhance strategic decision-making. Whether you're a staffing firm looking to optimize field teams or a manufacturer aiming to expand into new regions, thematic maps offer a straightforward way to visualize spatial patterns in your most important business data.
A thematic map, or statistical map, is a type of map visualization designed to illustrate a particular dataset or attribute. As per the formal thematic map definition geography provides, thematic maps solely depict the distributions, densities, and patterns of a chosen theme or variable across a geographic area.
Unlike general reference maps showing physical landscape features or political boundaries, thematic maps filter out those locating details. Instead, they use color, shading, symbols, and proportional symbols like scaled circles to highlight the spatial footprint of user-selected information.
Common thematic mapping attributes include:
In short, a thematic map filters out unnecessary details about physical locations and terrain and spotlights solely on depicting distributions and densities of user-selected information. So, you see patterns in data instantly.
Businesses can leverage thematic maps in territory mapping software solutions to identify new expansion opportunities, optimize territories for sales and operations teams, locate ideal sites for new retail outlets, model service coverage gaps, improve marketing efficiency, pinpoint areas of high insurance risk, and more.
With so many possible applications, thematic maps deliver immense value to business intelligence workflows. But simply having access to mapping capabilities doesn't guarantee effective results. Creating handy thematic maps requires carefully designing around the specific business need by using the right inputs, methodology, and tool configuration.
When creating a thematic map, it's critical to follow best practices:
Select the map type that will best highlight the precise data patterns and distributions you need to analyze for your business purpose. Match choropleth maps to regional overviews, heat maps to intensity, bubbles for totals, etc.
Flawed data destroys the reliability of any map's insights. Before mapping, validate information accuracy, fill gaps, structure data, geocode records, and normalize metrics.
Configure tools to automatically surface patterns plus allow custom analytics like thresholds, segmentation, change comparisons over time, blended data views, demographic expansion, and more.
By following best practices and continuously improving maps over time, your thematic creations will yield progressively richer and more actionable business value. Combined with mapping technologies, users can rapidly generate location intelligence at their fingertips.
As a leader in location intelligence software, eSpatial's powerful mapping software offers a full suite of thematic mapping capabilities to empower strategic business growth. With the flexibility to instantly map company data like operations, manufacturing or delivery sites, sales, customer sites, and service events, the eSpatial platform reveals hidden geographic insights without requiring extensive GIS knowledge.
So, why wait? Gain a location-based competitive edge from thematic views of your most vital metrics. Start creating your territory maps immediately with our territory mapping software and territory management solutions. Contact us today for a customized demo!