What is a distance radius map?
Distance radius maps are perfect for most industries' sales, marketing, and operations teams. A radius map excels as it shows a circle representing your chosen distance around a point or points on a map. You might want to display all customers within a 10-mile radius of your sales or service reps on a map. It adds a new layer of understanding as you make sense of your data. Sales operations teams use radius maps to uncover gaps in sales or service territories.
- Marketing operations use radius maps when planning campaigns or events.
- Operations managers use radius maps when uncovering inefficiencies in delivery or service operations.
- HR and recruitment managers can display candidates located within a radius, making their hiring process run smoother.
You are a visual learner, and maps are the perfect companion as you work through complex datasets. Using radius maps leads to more informed decisions on optimizing resources. They are also great for scenario planning, as you gain new insight faster. Say goodbye to your spreadsheets.
Why use distance radius maps?
Reassign resources from the closest service depot with a radius map
You can create multiple buffers from a single point in a data set or all points up to 200 points.
Creating buffers from all your locations reveals hidden insight. It also lends itself perfectly to sharing and collaborating with others.
At a glance, you can visualize, analyze and share your coverage areas and identify areas where you could expand or rightsize your resources.
Sales marketing and operations teams use radius maps
- Analyze sales or service territories to improve efficiency.
- Look at key performance indicators like travel time, revenue, and market share.
- Identify new locations for offices or franchises.
- Map all of the property locations to understand adjacency.
- Devise sales, marketing, and service campaigns.
- Plan your advertising initiatives and budget priorities.
- Communicate complex data in a simple, easy-to-understand format.
- Publish and share your maps with your team or embed them on a website.
How to use radius maps
Here is a 5-step to creating your map using the eSpatial radius tool:
1. Quickly evaluate your business
Every sales, marketing, operations, and service manager faces a constant challenge: How do you ensure you have the correct number of people on the ground while minimizing costs?
Rapidly assess your resource needs with a distance radius map. You can create coverage assignments for outside sales reps or new expansion opportunities. Ultimately, you get to redeploy resources to underserved but high-potential areas – so you're never leaving money on the table.
Or you isolate areas you may need to rightsize so you can redeploy resources to higher priority areas.
If you manage a transport or haulage business, distance radius maps help you reduce costs. By creating a radius map of your distribution centers and plotting all your deliveries as pins, you can ensure trucks minimize travel times and maximize fuel efficiency.
Map 1 – Areas that are within a one-hour drive from each service van, marked by the red vans
2. Try different buffer distances
Distance radius maps are also called buffer maps for a reason. In addition to the standard distance buffer, you can create drivetime buffers. They are ideal for making resourcing decisions about outside sales reps, service teams, and assets like trucks.
Real World Scenario - Sales rep
You are flying into Houston to meet prospects and want to ensure you minimize your travel time while maximizing your selling time. You use the drivetime buffer to plot all customers within the 45-minute drivetime of George Bush Intercontinental Airport. You can plan your day effectively.
Real World Scenario - Marketing
You are planning an event in San Francisco and want to select the best locations within a 1-mile radius of your customers. You plot all venues within your desired area and compress your planning cycle.
Real World Scenario - Distribution
You have a one-hour delivery commitment to customers from when they place an order. You use a drivetime buffer to ensure that you make that service commitment to those within a 30-minute drive time.
The options are endless.
3. Create sales and marketing campaigns
Using your existing sales data or a new sales lead database, you can plan highly focused sales campaigns for your reps in minutes. Imagine you have a new qualified sales lead database. You want your sales team to begin prospecting them for new business. How?
You plot those prospects with the highest sales potential within 60-minute drivetime of your rep's home or office location.
Color coding your highest-priority prospects on a map makes it easy for your sales team to identify and target them. You will focus your team and eliminate planning time while boosting productivity. You'll see the benefits of closing more deals and higher revenue.
Create your radius map
Start your 14-day free trial Link that points to /?modal=signup4. Analyze your marketing spend
Analyzing ROI is essential for all marketers. Visual insights make for better, faster decision-making. And mapping is ideal for achieving this goal.
For example, a retailer (eSpatial customer) used distance radius maps to reduce advertising spend with these steps:
- First, they mapped their customer and retail locations.
- Next, they overlaid their map with their advertising spending data.
- The map showed that more than 90% of their customers lived within a one-mile radius of their sites. Any advertising beyond that radius wasn't providing ROI.
- The retailer reduced advertising spend by 32% by focusing on customers within 1-mile of their locations. It did not impact retail sales but massively increased advertising dollars' ROI.
5. Publish & share your radius map
Boosting engagement and communication within teams is easy with sharing. Easily save, print, export, and share your maps. Embed a live map on your website, allowing your page visitors to zoom, pan, and view relevant information for themselves.
For a detailed explanation of how best to put eSpatial's radius-mapping capabilities to good use, look at our how-to guide or check out our blog for a more summarized overview.
Other maps you can make in eSpatial
Radius maps are just one of the many analysis tools you should consider. eSpatial is a power mapping software platform for sales, marketing, and operations. Consider how these other map tools within the platform can aid you in your business needs:
- Territory mapping: Design, realign and optimize sales and service territories, ensuring a balanced workload. eTerritory Territory mapping software is perfect for sales and revenue operations. It is the simplest, fastest most advanced territory management platform.
- Heat maps: Hot spot and regional heat maps can help you understand customer density, product sales trends, competitor density, hotspot areas, and whitespaces.
- Route mapping: Route optimization software for sales and service teams. Manage schedules, and maximize productivity and utilization, while minimizing planning and drive time. Simple, fast, and complete.
- Pin maps: A pin map, which is the starting place for most projects in eSpatial, can help you plot vast amounts of data, making data analysis accessible and easy for everyone.