Imagine that your job is to purchase advertising time from radio stations to market your product, a statewide tire service. You have demographic information for your state by county, and radio stations have supplied you with their own demographics and transmission ranges. You also have a list of your tire service center locations.
Using MapInfo Pro, you can quickly and easily bring this information into focus and make informed decisions about which radio stations to use to advertise your tire service.
In this example, you need to display the service centers on a map in relation to the radio stations, looking for the stations that reach the areas where your centers are located.
To begin building your map, you would open the MapInfo Pro tables you will need to give your map context: the state, county, and street maps. On this background you create the service center table and geocode it by matching the street addresses of the service centers to the street locations in your StreetPro map. A few more keystrokes add the tire centers to the map, and your data suddenly leaps into view. Blue stars tell you at a glance the distribution of your tire centers across the state. You use the same method to put the red circles representing the radio stations on the map.
Using your file of county demographics, you ask MapInfo Pro to shade the counties where most of your target market (males 35 and older) lives.
Consulting your list of radio transmission ranges, select the Buffer command and create a buffer circle around each radio station, the circle representing each station's broadcast area. Just by looking you can tell which broadcast areas include the highest concentration of tire service centers or you can ask MapInfo Pro to give you an exact count of the number of tire centers within each area. Tell MapInfo Pro to shade the buffer circles in order according to the number of service centers that fall within each circle. Shade the circles with the most service centers red.
With the radius of each station's transmission range marked, you can see which stations broadcast in areas where your target market is (the shaded counties). But how well do these stations penetrate that market? Which stations will reach the people who are most likely to use your service centers?
Join the demographic information supplied by each station to the broadcast area shown on your map. Click any point within that area and see all the demographic information: the age and income distributions of the station's listeners, and the times of day when particular age and income groups are tuned in, for example.
Even better, ask MapInfo Pro to cross-check the radio stations that reach your best customers with the areas where that population is highest. Fill the broadcast areas of those stations with crosshatching.
Look at the map and choose the stations that reach your best customers in the areas where you have the most locations. Your best bets are green-shaded circles in crosshatched areas. Now you know where your target customers are. Click the Info command on these areas to see the time of day your target market is listening. Now you know when to purchase air time.
You can save this map and use it for future planning. For example, it can help you spot a good location for a new tire center or coordinate radio advertising with direct marketing. Do you want to increase advertising in key areas of the state?
Use the MapInfo Pro LAYOUT tab to prepare a visually exciting and informative presentation that features this map along with tables.
As you become better acquainted with MapInfo Pro, you will find that its applications are limited only by your imagination.