Before opening a new franchise outlet, understanding the competitive landscape is essential for making informed business decisions. Analyzing competitor locations helps businesses identify underserved areas, avoid oversaturated markets, and select locations with higher growth potential. With MAPOG, businesses can know How to Map Competitor Locations on a single Interactive map, enabling franchise owners to evaluate market coverage and make data-driven expansion decisions.
Key Concept
MAPOG allows businesses to visualize competitor locations on an interactive map while enriching each location with valuable business information. Each competitor marker can include details such as the brand name, outlet type, address, contact information, operating hours, customer ratings, website links, images, and notes. Users can categorize competitors by brand, filter locations, analyze market density, and compare multiple franchise networks within a specific region.
Steps involves How to Map Competitor Locations Before Opening a New Franchise Outlet
Step 1 :Create and Upload Locations
Open MAPOG, and click on Open Workspace in the Operations & Planning section
Go to Locations, and click on Add, then select New Location Type to create a new Business Location Template. This ensures consistency and reusability.
Give a name, assign a suitable colour and select geometry type as point.
Add attributes that define your point such as address, brand, area and price range using text, number, dropdown or multi-select fields based on the information you want to capture. Once configured, then click create type to save the template.
Step 2 : Create a New Map
Come to the dashboard then, Click on Open Workspace in the Create & Publish section — where you can build interactive maps, add layers, run spatial analysis, and publish shareable maps using rich GIS datasets.
Click on Create New Map – choose Blank Map to start from scratch with your own data and styling, or With Template to use a pre-built layout you can quickly customize. Now click on the “with template” option.
Then select with template options like category map view, and click next.
Then provide a title, description, then click create to initialize your project.
Finally, after coming to the interface, open the settings.
Browse & upload your logo, and save your changes.
Step 3 : Add Locations to Your Map
Click add location and choose Upload CSV to import your real estate data. This converts spreadsheet records into interactive map locations with property details.
Then, select the created template from the dropdown and upload your CSV/Excel file, then give upload.
Assign a Unique ID to uniquely identify every location, helping prevent duplicates and enabling easy tracking and updates.
Later match the address, email, website and tower type column with excel attributes. In the select field type give latitude in first column, give longitude in second column, then give submit.
Step 4 : Style and Edit the points
Now click on the edit business location details option.
Add description and images and other required details to complete the attributes and follow the same procedure for other points.
Finally, click Add Layer Style to customize how the point appears.
Move to the category section, and select the required attribute in the required layer option.
Select an icon and colour to each, and save the style.
Now, select the label feature option.
In the select label feature give the layer which you want to label, then select the suitable font and colour, finally give the save label.
4. Filter by filter option:
Now go to the filter option, there you can find options such as footfall, student population and residential density.
Then select the layer which you want to filter, then type the tower type and apply. Now all the locations come under the expected footfall.
5. Group By Attributes option:
Open group by attributes option. In the property to group attributes, select the option which you want to group.
Then, give save changes, now you can see the locations grouped into high, low and medium.
Step 5: Preview & share option
Once your map is ready, go to Preview & Share. Use Add User to invite collaborators and assign roles—Editors can manage content and points (no admin/delete rights), while Viewers have view-only access.
Switch the map from Private to Public to enable sharing. Use the Share Link for quick sharing via email, chat, or social media.
To display your map on a website, select Share Embed Link and use the Embed Map option.
Application of How to Map Competitor Locations Before Opening a New Franchise Outlet
Franchise businesses can use MAPOG to map competitor outlets alongside their existing and proposed franchise locations. By visualizing competitor distribution, businesses can identify market gaps, evaluate customer accessibility, analyze clustering patterns, and choose strategic locations for expansion. Additional information such as nearby residential areas, commercial zones, transportation access, and demographic data can further support location selection and market analysis.
Conclusion
With MAPOG, businesses can simplify competitor location analysis before opening a new franchise outlet. By combining interactive maps with detailed competitor information, organizations can make smarter site selection decisions, reduce expansion risks, identify new market opportunities, and improve the overall success of their franchise network.