Business mapping a key part of site selection

In my conference presentations, I often ask economic developers how much they know about the businesses in their communities. How much data do they have about those organizations?

Do they have a reliable, recent list of all the businesses in their region? Can they map them? Can they sort them by industry, sub-industry or create custom clusters? Far too many of them say no. Many just don't have access to their information and they certainly wouldn't be able to visualize them on a map.

This is a big problem for economic development organizations because typically site selectors and businesses making location decisions want to know about the existing business climate and how businesses are dispersed across your area. Anyone making multimillion dollar business decisions wants to understand what other businesses there are and where they are located.

GIS Planning's ZoomProspector Enterprise GIS data tool is the only one in the industry to feature sophisticated business research and analysis in an easy to use online corporate site selection tool. Without it, you risk losing leads from potentially investors quietly doing their research online.

The business data (from InfoGroup USA) is automatically updated four times annually, so you can feel confident about the listings you feature on your website. 

Business research, analysis and mapping is easy, as you can see from the GIF below, using the ZoomProspector tool on the Greater Columbus Georgia Chamber of Commerce website. Reports are instantly generated for all available sites, buildings, and entire communities (search by city, county or region). Sort the data by NAICS code, annual revenue, number of employees, alphabetical, maximum or minimum value. Area searched can be modified with the radius tool, for a specific pinpoint on the map or with the free draw tool for a custom area.

Like all our reports, business search results can be shared via email, social media or as a custom generated link back to the analysis your website user has done.