The Science of Marketing

One Wednesday, not long ago, I was golfing with a friend who owns a local contracting business, and we got talking about advertising and promotions.  As a marketer, I’m amazed at the visibility he’s created for his small company.  Everywhere I drive, I see one of his trucks.  Every neighborhood I pass through, there’s a sign on somebody’s lawn with his company’s logo on it.  Every time those coupon packs show up in my mailbox, he’s offering a discount on window installations or free deck design services. I wanted to know his secret, so I asked how he can afford to be seemingly everywhere.

His answer: localize.  "I’m not everywhere," he said, "I focus on a very small area, and try to appear everywhere to the people who live there. Anything else would be a waste."

I know…it’s a pretty simple concept, but it’s a good reminder to all of us marketers, who often have to make a big splash on a little budget.  While we all want to do as much as possible to create visibility for our brand, we also want to remain as focused as possible to avoid wasteful activities.  The better we can understand who our targets are and where they get their information, the better our advertising and promotional plans will be.  This means:

• Segmenting your audience into multiple groups and building a profile for each segment
• Thinking about a day in the life of an individual in each segment, where she goes, what she does, who she interacts with, what she reads
• Finding the promotional opportunities others haven’t
• Going big where it matters most

With a local approach, we may not be everywhere, but to the people that matter, we’ll appear to be.  Do you localize your advertising and promotions?

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.