Every core and the strategic business decision is based on geography. The decision can be related to anything like business expansion, promotions, understanding the competition, or knowing where to put the store or facility. These are the most common applications for POI data. Location impacts business in every industry. In this article, we will summarize for you- What is POI? and how you can use it for various purposes. So let’s get started.

What is POI data?

POI is an acronym for point of interest data. This is data that effectively represents all the key locations and places. POI data is suitable for businesses looking to get location and business information for franchises or to provide facilities in a specific region. Retail stores, grocery stores, restaurants are some of the examples of POI data.

How is POI data sourced?

Point of interest data providers can source data from company store locators, commercial real estate companies, government sites, user review sites, etc. All these sources have some POI data but it varies in attributes, accuracy, and freshness. The tricky and critical part is to combine all the acquired data in a unified schema and verify the accuracy of the underlying datasets.

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What are some applications of POI data?

Retailers

Retailers use point of interest databases to analyze opportunities in the market, understand market share and market penetration to drive smarter decisions.

Financial service providers

Financial services professionals use POI data to analyze information coming from a point of the scale. For example - Bank branch performance is affected by the neighborhood and what’s nearby. A point of interest database is also used to investigate fraudulent behavior and understanding if the location of the business involved in a transaction reveals insights that may raise red flags. Managing branch location is also possible with POI data. It helps in analyzing competition and opportunity levels to ensure the efficiency of the firm's operations.

Insurance sector

Insurance companies use point-of-interest databases to loathe risk. The data helps in making decisions based on proximity of risk such as wildfires, flood zones, etc which allows mitigating risk. Insurance companies can know what type of business is co-located and which property can be insured for better prices.

Telecommunication

The telecommunication industry uses POI data to optimize network connections for different locations, planning networks, locating connectivity gaps and areas of infrastructure. The Teleco industry uses this data to understand market penetration, targeting, and retaining customers. This requires a detailed view of where market saturation and opportunity exist.

Real Estate

The real estate industry uses POI data to market its properties. Buying, selling, and renting a property is all about location intelligence. They also use real-estate data for market valuation using accurate data for valuation models and market research for pre-informed decision making. This helps real estate marketers to ensure higher profits.

Public sector

The public sector uses POI data to support economic development, determine community needs, managing public property, services, and transportation. All these activities require an understanding of where the current infrastructure is and where it needs to be developed.

POI data helps the public sector to plan for emergencies and create dynamic plans for disaster management, location of supplies and community resilience, etc.

People and businesses interact with POI data for multiple reasons. All the above points illustrate how versatile POI data is for every industry. However, the real value of data lies in their accuracy. To make accurate decisions the data must be precise and correct. In case if the data is false and inaccurate you can now imagine all your decisions will be based on bluntly false and outdated data. This could ultimately result in a loss of revenue. Considering this you must consider the point of interest data providers to get insightful data.

Wrapping up

Data is a big investment to the company, especially when it comes to navigation data. That’s why businesses need to ensure that they are investing in data that is of the highest quality and accuracy. The best way to get such data is through an experienced and trustworthy point of interest data provider. We recommend you to connect to SmartScrapers.com for POI datasets or any other data sets that you need. Bringing POI data to the business is not that easy but when it is done right it can give tremendous results to the user. Standardizing, structuring, and cleaning the unstructured data is a typical process hence it must be done by an expert so as the quality and freshness of the data are well maintained.