Direct marketers have long struggled to achieve the ultimate goal of getting the right message to the right person at the right time—and thereby gaining a sale. Now, the advent of location technology has added another dimension to that time-honored formula: getting a marketing message to the right place.

In a recent post at the MarketingProfs Daily Fix Blog, Paul Barsch details how "geospatial location intelligence" can be used to pinpoint customer location beyond the standard ZIP Code + 4 process that marketers have traditionally employed. (The ZIP + 4 identifies Postal Service ZIP Code areas, plus more specific locations within those areas, such as apartment complexes.)

"Going much further than simple ZIP + 4 formats, geospatial comes to life via the transformation of a customer address into geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude)," Barsch reports. "With geospatial, a whole host of marketing analytics is now available to marketers." He lists a few ways that the new technology can help target more tightly, among them the following:

Calculate distances between store locations. "[M]arketers can determine the midpoint between two stores to meet the needs of an underserved customer segment," Barsch explains. "With geospatial, there's no guessing."

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