Your proximity to venues affects demand for your business. Here’s why

You might be surprised to learn that the venues surrounding your business can be a strong indicator of real-world demand. Depending on your industry, you might not think the locations, sizes, or types of venues near you are relevant. However, venues can directly impact demand for your business, because they draw people, artists, businesses, advertising, and more. The attributes for these locations will determine the types of events taking place there. Events are known demand-causal factors, and different events can increase or decrease your demand.

What are venues?

Venues are locations where events occur. These range from the obvious like stadiums, concert halls and conference centers. But it also includes hotels for expos, parks for community events and even key street locations for protests. They serve as points of interest that determine the types of events you can expect in certain locations. For instance, if you are in Las Vegas, you’ll see more events that are compatible with the concert halls and convention centers in the city. There will be more festivals and concerts occurring in and around Las Vegas, rather than sporting events.

Venue data refers to meta information about key locations where events take place. Because there can be hundreds of impactful venues in a single city, you need venue data to harness their value at scale. PredictHQ collects information about the physical attributes of venues, like their precise latitude/longitude and capacity. We’ve aggregated this information from hundreds of sources, and have detailed information on venues all around the globe.

Every attendance-based scheduled event, such as a concert or expo, will occur at a venue, or a precise location. Identifying the impactful venues near your stores or locations, and tracking planned events provides a rich source of demand intelligence. You can leverage this intelligence to improve your strategies around demand planning, workforce optimization and more.

Why should you track Venue Data?

Suppose you were trying to predict demand for your rideshare business. You learn that expos at a convention center just down the road from a couple of hotels drives a huge influx of early morning customers that frequently catch you off guard. Identifying the sudden surge of bookings to the convention center in advance will enable you to prepare drivers nearby just before demand kicks in, reducing wait times and cancellations. You can locate similar convention center venues across multiple cities and you can imagine how quickly this scales in impact.

These are more obvious ways events and their venues influence demand, but there could be hidden revenue opportunities at some of the non-traditional venues. For instance, there could be a back-to-school picnic for a big public elementary school at a large local park. In the context of rideshare needs, this type of venue might only be in demand a few times a year. But having foresight into when these impactful events occur can help you prepare for a huge influx of customers who need rides to and from the park. You can leverage these insights to optimize driver recommendations, run promotional deals, decrease cancellation rates and increase customer satisfaction.

You might already be aware of large, impactful venues around some of the locations that matter to you, but accessing that information at scale can be tricky. You could take the time to search for every individual venue within a certain radius of locations you care about, but this would be tedious, and there’s no way to verify you accounted for every important venue.

To really get value out of this information, you would have to start tracking each event occurring at these venues, quantify each events’ potential impact, and predict how they’ll affect your business. You also need access to details that might not be readily available like the venue size and attendance capacity. And finally, you would need to take into account the individual event performers and the number of attendees they attract for that particular type of event.

All of this translates to a complicated business problem around quantifying the impact of different kinds of events at different kinds of venues. PredictHQ tracks metadata around both venues and performers, which we call entities. We collect both historical and future data on these entities, store it, and use it to help make predictions about the impact of events relative to the entities. We also enrich our event data with features like predicted attendance, predicted end times, and impact rankings. This creates a powerful forecast-grade data source that will give you accurate foresight into events, their venues, and how they will influence your demand.

The Impact of Venue Data

Incorporating event data into your demand planning process can help increase your revenue opportunities while reducing your operational costs. Event-based demand intelligence gives you insight into high-demand days, and ensures you’re prepared for real-world demand. If you factor in venue data as well, you can increase the potential benefits by improving the accuracy of your predictions.

For example, we’ve worked with a parking service business to help them understand demand for parking spots ahead of time by leveraging event and venue data. They found by incorporating event data they were able to improve their forecasting accuracy by about 4.4% in 26 out of 29 locations. When they added the venue data, they found locations that were not improved by event data were locations further away from venues. Events were less relevant to those specific locations. When they removed event data from those 3 locations, forecasting accuracy for those spots improved by almost 13%. Without access to venue data at scale, they wouldn’t know those locations would be less affected by events that are relevant to their other points of interest.

This is just one use case for venue data, but every business is unique. To learn more about how you can use event and venue data to increase revenue opportunities while reducing operational costs, reach out to PredictHQ to schedule a time to chat.