Use Direct Mail for Hyper-Local Marketing
According to BizReport 2010, up to 85% of a store’s customers come from within a 5-mile radius of that business.
In other words – your best customers may be right down the street, around the corner, or a couple of blocks away.
How do you reach THOSE prospects?
Making sure your message gets in the front of the right people – no more but no less – is an important goal for an effective and affordable marketing campaign. Frankly, a lot of advertising options wind up being expensive “overkill.”
It can be difficult to target something as small or as specific as “I want to reach the households within a 1 mile radius of The Village of Cherry Hill.”
One way to do that is with direct mail.
I did a search for households around The Village of Cherry Hill here in Columbia MO, and selected postal carrier routes that add up to about 5,000 homes. Those selections are reflected in the image.
It would be easy to reach those households with regular postcard mailings. For those businesses in The Village of Cherry Hill who target consumers directly (such as the chiropractors, fitness centers, optometrists, dentists, insurance agents and financial planners), this could be an extremely effective way to contact people who are predisposed to shop with companies that are convenient to their location.
An EDDM campaign would make postage extremely affordable; this relatively new USPS program allows firms to touch customers by neighborhood or zip code radius without names or addresses. Those businesses could even do a shared postcard mailing to minimize expenses even further.
You can also take the concept of reaching certain neighborhoods a step further by concentrating on those parts of town where you do not have a presence, but want one. Since neighborhoods tend to have shared characteristics and demographics (such as homes of the same age and in the same condition) you might want to target older neighborhoods if you own a roofing company, or newer middle-income subdivisions if you want to reach families with children.
I’d love to discuss the idea of a hyper-local, geo-targeted marketing campaign with you, and don’t want the hassle of printing and mailing, contact me today!
Tags: eddm, geo-targeted, local, neighborhoods
