Nugget 44: Local Area Marketing

Many businesses draw customers from a catchment area around their location.
 
Example business include building trades, health professionals, lawyers, architects.

This podcast introduces Local Area Marketing as part of a series on how to grow this type of business. 

The Local Area Marketing series covers ways of boosting sales in your catchment area systematically and with long lasting success.  Local SEO is covered in detail in the series.

Youtube: https://youtu.be/NUw-lls6BIs

Transcript: https://www.12faces.business/local-area-marketing-blog/

Transcript

0:02

Today, we're going to talk about local area marketing. So there's lots of different goals for marketing plans. This particular one is most appropriate for those businesses that need to reach out to potential customers in their catchment areas. So what sort of businesses are these? Primarily, they probably meet face to face; at least initially. And this would include things like the various building trades, health professionals like dentistry Audiologist, physio. And other professionals like lawyers and architects, all of whom need to have people that can interact with them. Face-to-face. So, what is the catchment? Well in the country areas, it's probably a central town and it's associated hinterland villages. And the city, it's probably the suburbs that business is resident in and the surrounding suburbs. It can be bigger or smaller in area. So, for example, a health professional might be smaller. It might be limited to four or five suburbs clustered around the one in which the business is located. On, the other hand a specialty lawyer who has many fewer clients might need a much larger catchment area in order to have sufficient clients. So essentially the catchment area that businesses of this type needs to focus on is an area big enough for you to make a substainable success and grow your business. If the catchment area is too small it won't do very well. Also keep in mind that you have to travel to service these clients or the clients have to travel to service you. If you're going to them then you might find yourself doing a lot of traveling that costs you. And if that's the case, then makes the job less commercially attractive as you move outside of certain radius from where you're normally located. We call this the donut problem and too many businesses focus on trying to get business from everywhere; and that would include the outer ring of the donut. But don't focus enough on getting business very close to them. And so they have a bit of a black hole in the middle of their donut That's not a very good structure for ones catchment area. So in this case, a test is how far you or the customer is willing to travel, to meet each other. What are the goals that we should be looking for in a successful local area marketing strategy? Well, One of the primary ones is long life. You want a marketing strategy that keeps attracting people for quite some time. Ideally, you also want a 24/7 available. So that no matter when the client gets the impulse to transact with you you're available. You need to be in front of them when they reach the point, that point, the consumption point, in the buyer's journey. It also needs a good return on investment. So the money that you put in needs to earn back several times, what you invested in order to retain good value to you. But also ideally gets the client to believe that you are a safe pair of hands that you can do the job professionally. You'll do it well. And this is called social proof. So that. people reassured that in fact, you can do the job properly. What marketing channels are relevant in this sort of situation? Well, On our website, 12Faces.Business we have in excess of 40 marketing channels, but not all of them are going to work in this particular instance. We can probably divide them into inbound and outbound. So outbound marketing channels are where you take the message to the client. And they would include things like advertising. That might include email and there could be cold emails so you're sending out emails to people who don't know you. It includes a newsletter or blog that you email out. And that the success of the newsletter is governed by how often you send it out? And what social proof that establishes for you. A problem with outbound marketing of this type is that it's gone in a few seconds. People get it. They notice it. they read it. And then they move on and it never resurfaces probably. So your only going to get impulse buys from these people, people who are ready to buy and your outbound marketing to them triggers. Because it's got a comparatively or usually as a comparatively short life expectancy. It probably has a fairly poor return on investment. you get very few orders coming back for how much you have to put in. But the positive side, though, it does build what's called brand awareness. So it does raise and keep raised your business. In the minds of consumers or people who might later become consumers. Inbound channels on the other hand have the advantage that the client contacts you when they're ready to consume, or at least ready to talk more? One type of inbound marketing is referrals. This is where third party tells another third party you can do the job properly. And these are extremely powerful because you're not bribing anyone. You're not controlling the process people are putting themselves out on a limb a little bit to tell others that you are a solution to this problem. And reviews of various types. A version of referrals. It's not person to person directly. But by putting up reviews associated with a person's name they are putting their reputation on the line somewhat. And reviews tend to be very highly relevant to consumers when they're looking around for social proof on your business. Brand awareness, which we've already spoken about. If they're already aware of your brand, then they're more likely to reach out to spontaneously inbound marketing. Social marketing is a possible source of inbound. But realistically speaking, if they don't have a pressing need to buy, they are not going to just start buying if they don't have the need. Social marketing can help with the brand awareness, but it's a little bit unclear as to whether it's a good marketing tool. Probably the most successful of all of them is search engine optimization of your website. And this meets a lot of our criteria. It's 24 7 available. Et cetera. There are some necessary conditions for your website to do it's job properly or to do it successfully. For example, the sitespeed. The speed at which your downloads needs to be less than five seconds. Anything more than that and the majority of people will go somewhere else. It needs to be a comprehensive cover of your catchment. It's no good advertising your service in the suburb in which you happened to have your office if you ignore the adjacent suburbs around you because it might not come up when someone is searching for a dentist in their suburb, as distinct from a dentist in your suburb. Ideally your search engine optimization should also show. the"what's in it for me" all of your products and of your services. What's in it for me is the most powerful marketing system around people are very much always looking at how something is going to help. And finally one of the other necessary conditions is the social proof. You need to be able to have independent advice that you're a capable business to service their particular needs. So let's give a quick summary of local area marketing and what to look for. The first step is to define your catchment area. This is the area that you want to reach out to on a regular basis. It's an area that's big enough to earn you the sort of income that you want but small enough so there's not a lot of wasted time traveling. You want to market to that catchment area and every component, every part of that catchment area with your popular services so no matter where a potential customer is in that catchment area or which of your services they're looking for, you'll turn up. The advantage of having a long life. 24-7 media, like your website is good because we'll have you in front of them no matter when they're going off to search. Now if you're one of these businesses work on a local catchment area. You could take some time to ask yourself a question about how well does your current marketing strategy service those sorts of goals? So in conclusion, please subscribe to this channel if you like it, so that you get more like this. Or please like this clip, if indeed you did like it, and please feel free to give us feedback about the pluses and minuses of the presentation and of the subject matter. If you'd like to read more on this topic, just go to our website, 12Faces.business. And you can search for any of the search terms that rang a bell with you in the course of this video. Thank you very much for your time.