In our previous article, we discussed insight, and how it pertains to direct marketing. In a nutshell, insight is a way of determining what defines your ideal customer. Once you know who you are aiming your marketing at, the question then becomes: where can you find them?
That is where mapping comes in.
What Is Mapping?
For the purpose of direct marketing, mapping is the process of planning out your distribution area. In the old days, this process was a simple one – you would target a certain range of streets and post a leaflet, pamphlet, or flyer through every letterbox. Aside from the proximity to your store, there was little way of knowing (aside from a good knowledge of local demographics) whether any given road was more likely to produce more leads than another.
With today’s mapping tools and the proliferation of Big Data, that has all changed.
Choosing Your Distribution Area
Your campaign insights will already have shown you some key pointers about your ideal customer. With the right mapping software, you can transpose those insights onto a map, focussing on postcodes where the residents fulfil several of your existing criteria.
For instance: let’s say you provide a high-end product or service – one that your market research suggests is only likely to be taken up by customers above a certain earning threshold. With accurate mapping, you can limit your distribution network to postcodes where the average household earnings are higher than that.
Similarly, if your product or service targets a particular age or ethnic demographic, we can map a distribution route which is more likely to include people from that kind of background.
Areas to Avoid
As well as selecting areas that correlate with your target audience, part of your mapping strategy should involve removing postcodes that are outside your demographics.
For example, if your product is targeted towards 18-30 year olds, postcodes with a large number of age groups of 50+ are unlikely to yield positive leads.
Why Is Mapping So Important
It all comes down to resources. Printing and distributing marketing materials costs money. The better you can map your distribution route, the more of marketing materials will end up in the right hands. This means more interest, more leads, more conversions, and more money for you and your company.
Why waste your marketing budget on a blanket approach to distribution, when effective mapping increases your chances of a sale exponentially?
