When companies have access to up-to-date addresses, they unlock a wealth of insight that can help them better understand sales territories – allowing them to more accurately target clients with their products or services. However, it’s often not enough to have a contact’s address, especially since many addresses can become corrupted with errors such as typos and misspellings. And that’s why more and more companies are leveraging geocoding, or the process of assigning latitude and longitude coordinates to a precise location.

Geocoding has several uses, and adoption has proven to be beneficial for B2B companies. The technology allows businesses to enhance sales, refine marketing, improve communications, and optimize processes. Here are five ways geocoding improves B2B operations.

1. Targeted service offerings

Companies can geocode the addresses of their high-quality leads, allowing them to better understand and analyze opportunities. Beyond understanding their proximity to competitors, companies can also identify patterns and trends within a community and how their products or services may be offered to a specific area.

2. Increased target audience exposure

Geocoding can help you optimize your marketing efforts by giving you an overview of a city in relation to residential areas and business districts. With this interpolated data, you can recognize patterns, allowing your business to identify clusters of potential clients in a certain area. With this insight, you know where your target audience will most likely be exposed to your advertisements.

3. Optimized driving routes

Geographic information systems (GIS) rely on coordinates to locate a certain spot and guarantee the quickest and most direct route to that spot. You’re losing money in many ways when drivers get lost due to addresses that lead them into hard-to-navigate streets and confusing neighborhoods. You’re wasting gas. You’re wasting time. You’re missing the opportunity for more deliveries. And you’re disappointing the client waiting for their delivery, which can result in a loss of trust or faith in your company’s abilities.

4. Reduced risk of miscommunication and missed opportunities

Inaccuracies end up in your contact data in many ways. Addresses can become invalid when people move or when cities change their street names and zip codes. Many online addresses also contain typos, such as misspelled street names. Inaccurate and incomplete addresses can ultimately lead to unsuccessful deliveries, which can result in loss of trust and misunderstandings. With geocoded addresses, plotted latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates define the location, helping increase successful deliveries regardless of any errors or changes that may exist in the address.

5. Higher quality data

Combining geocode addresses with other business data can help optimize processes, better analyze geographic and market allocations, guide advertising and marketing strategies, and target qualified leads.

At RunnerEDQ, we provide precise rooftop geocodes for 95% of all physical addresses in the U.S. as well as 40 countries around the world. Our unique address parsing and matching algorithms help GeoCoder fix spelling errors and complete addresses that have missing or invalid components to provide more precise results. In addition to rooftop (highly precise) geocoding, we have other levels of accuracy to meet every need and budget.