Our recent trip to Chicago exhibiting at the ALA Midwinter Meeting inspired this week’s SimplyMap blog post. Today, we’re going to demonstrate how to use business points in SimplyMap to answer a basic question that a person opening a business might ask - what’s the competition like in the area?

To emulate a real world scenario, we only want to look at a specific area. In this example, our location will be “The Loop” in Chicago. The Loop in Chicago is composed of these ZIP codes: 60601, 60602, 60603, 60604, and parts of 60605, 60606, 60607, and 60616.

First, create a custom location that is composed of the aforementioned ZIP codes.

Next, select a pertinent variable for your map. In this example, we will use: Food away from home (Household Average), 2014 to identify the areas where people tend to eat out for meals.

Now that you have a map showing the custom area mapped with the chosen variable, you can add the relevant business points.

Select “Businesses” from the left panel and type in the search “pizza restaurant”. Select “show businesses” and SimplyMap will place a point on the address of each relevant business.

Lastly, to see a list of these business points in a report, select “Actions” from the top right of SimplyMap and click “Make Report from Businesses”. Here’s a sample of what to expect:

We hope you enjoyed this week’s SimplyMap report. Stay tuned for more interesting reports and tips!

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