Location Smarts: How You Can Use Area to Your Business' Advantage

When running a business, one of the most critical concepts is the product, price, place, and positioning of the brand. For many businesses, especially retail or food stores, location is the most important factor to achieve success. Therefore, picking the right area can be critical to business survival. This article will explain how you can use the location of your business to give you a competitive advantage over other firms.

Watch Your Demographic

When picking the right location for your business, proximity to customers is extremely important. Business owners should carefully study the spending of habits of potential customers in the prospective geographic area before investing in specific venues. For many businesses, this can mean locating stores on busy streets or inside popular shopping malls. For other service type businesses, locating offices in a city with many other successful firms in similar industries can help with recruitment. Further, these types of businesses can benefit from collaboration and close partnership with other nearby firms.

Keep Expense in Mind

When picking the right location for a new storefront, generally price is the most important factor. While it can be argued that price will generally buy quality, the value of a specific property is different between industries. Luxury retailers, world-class consultants, and high-end stores can benefit from more expensive establishments, since they will help attract better customers and employees. You might want an intimidating look with high security Lynx Brand Fence Products Ltd. Chain link fence from Calgary to show how much your business is worth. However, not all businesses can benefit in the same way from these more expensive locations. Most businesses are still better-served by selecting a more affordable location.

Is Location Relative?

Businesses can also use area to their advantage by working through the internet. With the internet, international communications can take place in milliseconds. Since voice-over-IP services allow for close communication using both live visuals and sound, many businesses can function successfully without even needing an office. Consulting and high-tech firms can often work from home in a virtual team to successfully meet deadlines and complete client work without ever needing to meet in-person. As business continues to get closer through the internet, the amount of these new location-free businesses will continue to grow.

Finally, businesses can use location to their advantage by getting away from existing competitors. If an entrepreneur is looking to start a fence company, placing a store directly across the street from an existing competitor would be an uphill battle. Instead, the entrepreneur could perform careful market research to unveil competitive geographic opportunities that could contribute to success. Through this research, an entrepreneur would likely discover many locations under-served in the existing marketplace. Once these opportunities are discovered, the entrepreneur can simply go out and find an establishment in the desired area.

About the author

Brooke Chaplan is a freelance writer and blogger. She lives and works out of her home in Los Lunas, New Mexico. She loves the outdoors and spends most of her time hiking, biking, and gardening. For more information, contact Brooke via Facebook at facebook.com/brooke.chaplan or Twitter @BrookeChaplan

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