While many modern businesses are operating (or at least claim to operate) on a global scale, there are still many industries where it is crucial to target prospects from a specific location. And even international players want to gain insights on the markets of smaller geographical areas. Whatever your use case may be, our location filters are here to help you narrow down your lists to specific areas.

To better understand our location filters, we will walk you through the three main types of location filters: 1. Location types, 2. Geographical locations and 3. Location amounts.

Location type and geographical locations are linked together, but it's good to start by considering the location type: do you want to find prospects that have their HQ in a specific location or is it sufficient if a prospect has a secondary office, a warehouse or a factory in the location you are about to define. The answer of course depends on your use case, but make sure you know the differences between the available options.

This is the bread and butter of location filtering. You have a selection of options to choose from when trying to find prospects from a specific area. Are you looking for regions, streets, or would you rather draw your own areas. Anything is possible.

The most accurate option when you want to target prospects based on their address. A street name is a good starting point, but you can also add street numbers to your query. Note that similar street address might exist in different areas, so pairing the Street Address filter with another location filter might sometimes be required.

Aside from street addresses, postal codes have proven to be a great way to locate prospects within the same neighborhood or area. As with most other filters, you can add multiple values to your query and target multiple postal codes on the same list.

Going up a tier we get Visiting city containing a full alphabetical list of cities (or similar geographical entities) that are available in the database. Note that list might not correlate with official nomenclature or selection but only reflects the conventions used in the addresses of our official data sources.

Municipalities are officially defined administrative areas that vary in number and size depending on the country. As with Visiting cities, the alphabetical list available in the filter might not correlate with official listings. In Finland a municipality is called kunta, in Sweden kommun, in Norway kommune, and in Denmark kommune.

Provinces are similar to municipalities but larger in size. In Finland a province is called maakunta, in Sweden region, in Norway landsdel, and in Denmark region.

Nordic databases are already targeting specific countries by design, but a Country filter has been included in our Global database, since it includes prospects from all over the world. Vainu Global users often like to select a set of countries matching their target markets and ICP.

The truest power tool in location filters is our Map filter which allows you to draw interesting geographical areas as you please. Let's take a few moments to discuss the different features of the map filter, so you are better equipped to reap benefits from it.

The icons on the right-hand side starting from the top: full screen toggle, zoom in, zoom out, your location, free drawing tool, rectangle drawing tool, circle drawing tool, delete. Also note the search icon in the top-left which allows you to center the map on a specific location right from the start.

The best way to use the map filter, in our experience, is to first focus on your area of interest and then draw the relevant area by choosing the most suitable drawing tool for your particular use case. To focus on a specific area, you can for example:

Don't forget to zoom in and zoom out to make sure your entire area of interest can be seen in the map square - but not much more. This will make drawing the area easier.

Finally, pick the drawing tool you want to use:

Once an area is drawn, you can click on the area to edit the area, remove the drawn area or even to turn the area into an excluding filter. In that case, your search will only return prospects that are not situated in the area that you drew.

Finally, we can discuss the two filters targeting the number of identified locations or the number of identified countries of operation.

The location count filter allows you to look for prospects based on how many different locations they have. These might include anything from offices to stores and factories to warehouses. If your business case is about finding prospects managing a lot of real estate, this filter might turn out to be a real goldmine. Note that you can also turn the filter upside down by asking the list to exclude prospects with a certain amount of locations.

If international prospects are in your ICP, we recommend giving the Countries of operation filter a try. It works just like the Location count filter: define a range of countries you are interested in (or want to exclude) by dragging a selection on the scale or by typing in the exact minimum and maximum values that you are targetting.