Weathering the Storm: How Hyper-Local Climate Insights Can Give Your Business an Edge

As a business owner, you’re always on the lookout for tricks to fine-tune your operations and pad your bottom line. With the advent of Big Data and data analytics, it is now much easier to tap into market trends and hitherto unforeseen correlations for marketing and sales. While the world is busy with artificial intelligence and data analytics, a smaller player has been making big waves across all industries – weather intelligence.

Weather intelligence is the next step up from weather forecasts. Forecasts merely predict weather patterns in your area and give you probably weather conditions. Weather intelligence tells you how these forecasts are likely to affect your business operations. Many people discount weather intelligence’s effectiveness because it can be challenging to visualize how the weather affects operations. However, its importance cannot be overstated, especially when living in a world where we are farming more data than ever and figuring how correlations between so many aspects of the world and consumer behavior.

How Can Weather Intelligence Help My Business?

It Gives You a More in-Depth Insight Into Consumer Behavior.

Consumer behavior has been the subject of study across disciplines. Corporations spend millions of dollars every year in their efforts to capitalize on consumer spending habits and mindsets to boost sales. With weather intelligence, you can also utilize how consumers behave during different weather events to maximize your productivity and profit.

For example, brick and mortar shops see a drop in sales during inclement weather since fewer people leave their homes to purchase goods. Hot weather sees a rise in sales of cold beverages while the winter slows down their sales. Similarly, using weather intelligence, you will find similar correlations between your customers and the local weather.

It Can Make for Better Financial Planning

Products and services on the market often see seasonal fluctuations in price. It is often challenging to make these predictions at the beginning of the financial year since these seasonal fluctuations depend on the climate. With weather intelligence, you can gain more insight into exactly how much the weather patterns influence these fluctuations and make evidence-based decisions and projections about the same.

Accounting for these changes to the price of goods and services can also help you make pricing decisions and take advantage of these changes. It would put you in a position to boost your sales during leaner months by offering introductory promotions to onboard customers to increase your profits when you return to regular pricing. Promotions like these can also help improve your customer reach.

Make Operations More Efficient

If you run a company that conducts services outdoors, you already know how severe weather events can impact your planning and relationships with clients. Whether you run an events company, logistics company, or utility company, bad weather more often than not delays deadlines and plays havoc with your typical workflow.

With weather intelligence, you can not only get a forecast about upcoming weather events, but you also get a chance to plan for the fallout of them. As an events company, you can avoid scheduling outdoor work for the day and instead shift operations to a warehouse. As a logistics company, you can inform the clients about possible delays and offer alternatives. Even if you’re a restaurant, you can figure out how many of your staff need to come in for the day.

Boost in-House Performance

Did you know weather affects your employees’ productivity? Lousy weather generally correlates with higher productivity, while bright and sunny weather makes productivity go down. Using weather forecasts, you can more efficiently estimate how much work gets done. In turn, you can take on more work from clients and schedule to meet deadlines faster.

During periods of bad weather, you can avoid taking on more work than your company can handle and give employees more lenient deadlines. This has the added benefit of boosting employee satisfaction, which will lower your attrition rate and cultivate a supportive workplace culture.

How Can I Start to Use Weather Intelligence?

The easiest way you can start using weather intelligence is by tracking the weather’s effect on your business, productivity, sales, marketing, and operations. Since this is a difficult task, you can take the help of apps, APIs, and software to do this for you. You can take many approaches in this regard that will depend entirely on your budget and what you want to use it to achieve.

A great point to start is ClimaCell’s weather blog, which will give you insights beyond forecasts on how incoming weather patterns is projected to affect businesses. It also contains a lot of foundational information about this field that is invaluable as you start exploring the impact weather has on your business.

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