How to Choose the Ideal Retail or Restaurant Location

You’ve heard the advice before – location, location, location.

Do you choose a spot in the heart of downtown with real estate priced to the max, or on the edge of town where real estate is much more affordable? Do you take the word or opinion of other interested parties that the location you are interested is a “good” place, or do you want to make your own informed decision backed by data.

A Simple 3 Step Process

Demographics that tells you about your customers

Most businesses start their location search in an area based on some customer demographics. Looking for females 15-24 for that new hip hair salon, or college educated families with young kids?

With IdealSpot’s demographics report, you can select four target locations and choose from insights such as population statistics, market risk, income breakdowns, lifestyle analysis, and many others.

Once you have found the areas that match your basic demographics, you’ll want to be sure those customers have shown interest or demand in your business category. This is what our customer location targeting maps are designed to do. There is no sense opening up a sushi restaurant when few people in the surrounding area show any interest in sushi.

What are your customers’ interest and what do they spend their money on?

IdealSpot allows you to tap into many real-time data sources such as web search, social media, and spending patterns. Imagine being able to cross-reference young, college-educated women from our free demographics filters with customers who are also expressing interest in MAC cosmetics, Pantene hair care, and Lululemon clothing. This is the true pulse of up-to-the-minute customer behavior.

Our machine learning algorithm (supervised by our data scientists) analyze your business. We then produce a heat map that shows you where those who have expressed interest or demand are. This data is sourced from Facebook, Google, Yelp, Instagram and others. Once you know a block group has met your demographic and customer targeting criteria, it’s time to understand how that area gets its traffic.

“This tool is amazing. Our business depended on selecting the right locations. If these types of reports were available to us, we might have made very different choices for our locations.”

Danny Ross
Former COO of How Do You Roll?

We all want traffic

IdealSpot’s traffic report lets you know if the locations around your target market are easily accessible. We also understands that different business models account for different drive times. Cafe and coffee shop owners may want early morning traffic counts while causal restaurants want to look at traffic counts around noon to accommodate the lunchtime crowd and fine-dining establishments want diners in the evening.

With our traffic data, you have the ability to set the time-of-day and day-of-week for multiple locations to tailor the report for your business.

Also included in our traffic report is insight into how a local population moves within a specified area. Tracked via mobile devices, this anonymous data can show you where the majority of your customers are coming from and going to after leaving your location. Armed with this information, you will be able to scout more locations that are similar to the ones you know to be successful.

‍