Transcript: The Opportunities With Marketing Geographically
This is the fourth and final episode in my mini-series on the importance of Geography for modern marketers. We’ve explored the reason why Geography is essential and the pitfalls of overlooking where your audience lives.
Today, we explore the benefits of geography and how you, as a marketer, have an unprecedented opportunity to connect directly with your audience in the place they are vs. the place you think they reside.
Let’s explore the Opportunities with Marketing Geographically.
Hi, I’m Josh, and this is the thoughtunpacked podcast, an exploration into the world of modern marketing. My hope: bring some context and clarity into an industry that impacts our everyday lives.
When we start to consider the opportunities that modern marketers now have with geography, we should, at first, acknowledge the past. Historically, geographical importance was the domain of local media and marketing tactics such as store design or direct-to-consumer mailers. Anything beyond these local plays wasn’t specific, as the targeting capabilities were non-existent. The majority of word-of-mouth was held within the borders of a town or portion of a city. Further, anything that targeted a larger geographical area (i.e. beyond the local newspaper) was often made to look and sound generic. Super Bowl ads reflect this to a T. They speak to the middle of society because speaking to the fringes through a Super Bowl ad would be both odd and extremely expensive.
The problem with relying on local media and foot traffic as your primary sources of geo-located marketing is that the majority of people who read, watch or listen to the local stuff also consume the much larger, better-funded and often better quality national/global media and foot traffic is kind of like playing roulette; you never honestly know if that prospective customer is going to walk into your store or the store just down the road.
Sure, many local shops did (and do) well. Yes, marketing through these channels can (and does) work. But for a brand to grow, these historical avenues didn’t provide a powerful punch.
As a modern-day marketer, you have a far greater arsenal of tools to help you be extremely specific with your geographical targeting while manoeuvring those markets like we did, historically, through more extensive national campaigns. Yes, the problems are there, but let’s explore the advantages.
One of the most incredible opportunities I see is the ability to reach into a community and listen. I recall early in my career having to hold a focus group. Even as a jr. marketer, I thought this was a complete waste of time — and it was. When focus groups come together, they are primed to give “the answers.” Their experience with the new product or service isn’t the same as the average consumer. The typical consumer doesn’t have direct access to the lead product designer, head technician, and the CEO — and a plethora of free food and drinks. Sure, we would get the soundbites we wanted, “Oh, I love the new colour” or “I could 100% see this in my life,” but they weren’t informative. As a modern marketer, what you as a modern marketer have is an opportunity to reach into these lucrative communities, sit back, and listen to honest conversations without hindering focus group trappings.
Not that long ago, I was helping a developer consider what they should do for a marketing campaign. They were in the process of building a new condo (surprise), and they needed help selling units. The condo had one massive thing going against it — location. It wasn’t in a desirable area and, in truth, was going to be a hard sell. So they asked the agency I was at to explore how to market the thing. At first, we took the tried-tested-and-true approach. We blasted out emails and social media ads extolling the virtues of this new condo, highlighting the few key features it had. We ran search and display ads for anyone who was searching for a house in our area. After a few aggressive (and expensive) months, we came up with ZERO sales. Yes, we had generated interest — but not enough to make anyone want to buy. Flabbergasted (I love that word), my creative director turned to me and said, “what the hell do we do now?” Remember, this approach we were taking had always worked. It WAS the approach. When we sold the idea to our client, they didn’t question us for a second. It was the marketing equivalent of buying a Canon Camera — you know “it will work.” But, as so often is the case — it didn’t.
When my CD came to me, I proposed what was, at the time, a radical idea. We should invest a few weeks of our services and listen. Listen to what people are saying on social media. Listen to what searches people were using to find out about our condo (or competitors). Listen to what the media was saying, as well as notable influencers and creators. To say my CD was shocking would be an understatement. He believed that action was the only way out of the hole we had found ourselves in — but I pressed (and being his equal) won out. After a few weeks of listening, we discovered several key insights that led to a few conclusions. First, selling our condo to the market we HAD been targeting was likely never going to work. Listening to people in this area let us know that we would never really sell the condo beyond a shadow of a doubt. Next, we discovered that another area we had neglected could be the prime location, but our messaging would need to change radically. Finally, we found that the price-point was the most significant inhibitor no matter the area and that many people were considering condos for far less. We presented our findings to our client — who wasn’t happy about the price thing but was willing to listen — and we changed our entire approach. It made a massive difference, and we started to see the sales we had expected in the first place.
Beyond the ability to listen, as a modern marketer, you can use tools to help you better understand the local perspective. Platforms like Facebook, Google, and MailChimp all offer resources to help refine your geographical understanding. These resources can be expensive — Facebook has one such tool that costs approximately $75,000 — but this is a drop in the bucket compared to what it would have costs to immerse yourself in local culture genuinely.
Of course, each platform offers the ability to geographically target ads — getting as specific as zip codes or a 1-mile radius around a pin-drop. But this functionality has its limitations as it relies on you to input the correct coordinates and then, more importantly, run the accurate ad.
However, there is one other opportunity with geographical marketing: the envy of anyone in the industry 15 or 20 years ago.
Like listening, the other massive opportunity is measurement. Measurement is seen and used to report against the success of a campaign or initiative. Marketers will establish goals and KPIs and then use measurement to prove they were successful or prove they need more time (never that they were wrong). But it is through measurement that, like listening, a wealth of information resides on geography.
If you are not familiar with Google Analytics (and, as an aside, that would be one tool I suggest you check out), you won’t know that they have a whole section dedicated to geographical reports. But these reports aren’t unique to GA. All major social media channels have similar outputs, the same as any primary email marketing service. Long ago, someone thought that geography was an essential factor to include — but we often neglect them as just “another” number. But unlike the numbers you’ll get from a Google Ad campaign or an organic post on Instagram, geographical numbers can be, again like listening, uninhibited by your actions. Sure, you are running ads in XYZ and ABC cities, but the fact that people from ABC stayed on your website five times longer and purchased ten times more was utterly out of your control. But many marketers don’t look at the numbers in this way.
They look at their campaigns and assess that the creative targeting XYZ didn’t resonate. But the truth is that the lovely people in XYZ will never purchase, or at least not on mass. In contrast, the people in the city ABC love what you’ve got. They are your audience.
By examining the numbers through this lens, you can begin to unpack why that may be. Maybe a competitor has a stronger foothold in XYZ. Perhaps the fine people in ABC have had a poor experience with alternatives and are hungry for what you are offering. Whatever the case, through a geographical dissection of the numbers, you can begin to discover insights similar to what my team and I realized when we sat back and listened.
There are numerous conveniences for modern marketers, and one of the most incredible opportunities is to create understanding — seeing people where they are, unsullied by marketers who overreach.
Thank you for listening to the thoughtunpacked podcast. If you have a thought you want unpacked, please reach out on Twitter or Instagram.
I’ll be back with a whole new series for season three — this time focusing on a personal passion of mine — the study of behavioural science and how we are explicitly intertwined with the human experience as a marketer.
