Using your neighbourhood as a target base to find new customers.
On the streets where you live – Local Marketing
As a business owner, one of the most effective ways for you to compete with big-name, big-budget, high street companies is to unleash the power that's right on your own door-step. And the way to do this – Neighborhood Marketing – using your own neighbourhood as a target base to reach individual communities with relevant specialised messages. Below are several key principles that will help you to implement a local neighbourhood marketing campaign.
Key Principles in Neighbourhood Marketing
Proximity
Neighbourhood marketing means concentrating your marketing strategy on prospects who live within a 5 – 10 minute drive from your location. That’s where the overwhelming majority of your best prospects’ are most likely to come from. If you use the mass media you will pay to cover a large geographical area, most of which is not in your immediate neighbourhood, and is irrelevant for your new marketing strategy. Understanding the make-up of your own area will present new opportunities to increase your profits.
Customer Focus
Satisfy the needs of customers at the highest level you can: so that your business will always be the first one they think of. Because you are operating in a limited geographical area they will always be local conditions you can exploit, for example: if a particular area has a greater than average percentage of older people—home visits, or free transport to your location could be a good incentive offer to get your business noticed locally. Moreover, focusing on specific customer needs within your neighbourhood will help you to define distinct customer groups.
Customer focus begins with profiling and categorising your customer base. Profiling will help you to divide your market into segments and spot those areas that are the most profitable, and fastest growing. Once identified you can focus your resources on those segments that will yield the greatest opportunities. This information is critical to the success of your business; it will help you to gain greater understanding of the different groups within your neighbourhood, and how you can satisfy their requirements.
Key Benefit
Select a core activity that your business can excel at. Consider providing a local incentive as outlined above, or some service that provides added value, or greater customer satisfaction. Because you are operating in your own local area, it might be possible for you to provide a first-rate local incentive that a big outside competitor could not match. So, provide a key benefit to local customers for using your product or service. Make it the best you can. Make it available only within your neighbourhood to those who can have the greatest impact on your business. Give this proposition some serious thought. By making it available only in a limited geographical area, to a selected number, it becomes less costly for you to provide, while at the same time being perceived by the customer as an exclusive, tangible benefit. This will again enhance your business reputation in your area.
Profiling Your Neighbourhood
Finding new customers from close neighbourhoods is the task we set ourselves. Therefore, the key to a successful neighbourhood campaign is to identify and contact just those households where your very best prospects are likely to live. So, you must have a marketing program that will focus on only those households within your neighbourhood where your best prospects are likely to live.
So the first requirement is to find out who exactly buys from you at present, and then to find similar types of customer to sell to, and so increase revenue. When I use the phrase: “similar types of customer” what I’m talking about is profiling: finding out what characteristics are typical or prevalent among the past best customers in your current customer database, and then finding new customers with characteristics “profiles” that are very similar to your current best customers.
On scrutiny of your database of past customers one of the most elementary and informative pieces of information you should have is their address. Are past customers located in particular areas indicated by their postcodes? Postcodes are a key tool in profiling customers, and the types of area in which they live. Once you have a full postcode you can use it to find out a great deal about the socio- economic characteristics of that particular area. The more you discover about your current customer base, the better placed you will be to find new prospects, who exhibit very similar characteristics to those of existing customers.
Start with the address. A good way to do this is to go through the invoices on your data- base, find your best past customers’ and then profile them to find out all about them. Where do they live? What sort of neighbourhood is it? What’s the average house price? Is the housing stock predominately private, or local authority? Is it an urban, or semi-rural area? What is its socio-economic status?
This type of research: identifying groups of individuals by the type of environment, or neighbourhood they live in is called – geodemographics, and, that’s the only time I’ll use the word in this article.
Neighbourhoods are, in fact, the sum of their parts. Some neighbourhoods can be clearly defined by the predominant housing type, others by demographics, and still others by environment. The trick to effective marketing is to look at all these factors and come up with
a strong definition of the predominant characteristics of your target neighbourhood, and the buying habits of the people who live there.
The point is: when you have built a good accurate customer profile of past, and present customers it’s a simple matter of finding similar type of neighbourhood and prospects to promote to. What you find out about your present customers’ can point you in the right direction for future marketing campaigns. A lot of significant information on neighbourhood profiling can now be easily assessed through the Internet. Moreover, much of this valuable information is free to the user.
Close Neighbour Profiling
Many businesses providing local products and services to householders often find that many of their best sales leads come from the same neighbourhood, and sometimes even live on the same street as one of their good customer’s. Focusing on the neighbours of your best customers’ is a quick and easy way to compile short lists for special promotional campaigns.
Banks, financial planning, and insurance services have also found that people who can afford the lifestyle of their best clients’ often live next door. This is called Close Neighbour Profiling.
Search your customer database, and find the addresses/postcodes of your most profitable customers. Enter these postcodes into a street mapping website. The website will then find the location of the postcode you entered and display a street level map centred on that postcode. From this you will be able to identify adjoining streets where close neighbours live.
Each full postcode, or unit postcode as they are known, contains on average 14-15 residential addresses. So, by noting the names of adjacent streets, and looking up their respective postcodes, you can quickly compile a listing of close neighbours who will probably share very similar characteristics to present good customers.
Keep your list limited to 50 -100 individual households to maintain integrity. With a short, targeted list like this, you could easily do a neighbourhood walk, and simply drop your marketing literature through the letterboxes of all the targeted houses on the list. Remember, neighbourhood marketing is about thinking small, and keeping it local.
To find out more about neighbourhood marketing go to: www.downyourstreet.info
Article Source: http://www.theukarticledirectory.co.uk/.
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