Local marketing campaign.

A local Door-to-Door marketing campaign can be easily organised and put into practice with the minimum of resources. Our Free Report: “Neighbourhood Marketing Strategies” covers all the essential information you will need to select and target potential new customer segments in your own neighbourhood. For businesses that want to mount more substantial local marketing campaign there’s information on engaging a professional distribution company.

Your marketing material should be of a high standard, and carry a strong incentive message so recipients will want to respond. Incentive ideas are covered in the report.

For a local Door-to-Door campaign I would suggest a minimum of 500 postcard mailers delivered to carefully selected letterboxes in your target neighbourhood. If the target streets and houses are in close proximity to one another an average walker should be able to comfortably deliver 500 card mailers in a single morning. Of course, if your budget can take it the more mailers you send out the greater the potential to gather more leads and customers.

If you would prefer to have the card mailer delivered by regular post using Royal Mail this would be more costly and time consuming option as you would have to buy postage, and put a stamp and address label on each card. But, for difficult to reach rural areas, or exclusive developments it might be the only way you can reach some potential customer segments.

Our Print Partner can supply 500 A6 size, gloss postcards, or handouts for around £100.00. If you visit our Print Partner’s Website you will find a full range of marketing materials and prices allowing you full control over the cost and timing of your campaign.

Close Neighbour Profiling

The key to a successful local marketing campaign is to identify and contact just those households where your very best prospects’ are likely to live.

One quick and simple solution is to scrutinise your customer database, and dig out the addresses of previous customers. A previous customer address list is one of the most elementary, but informative listings you have. From your previous customer address list you can find out if past customers’ are 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 a particular area. The more you discover about your current customers’ and the types of neighbourhood they live in the better placed you will be to find new prospects, who live in the same types of neighbourhood and have very similar characteristics to those of existing customers.

So, find your best past customers' and profile them. Where do they live? What sort of neighbourhood is it? What's the average house price? Is the housing stock predominantly private or rented? Is it an urban, or semi-rural area? What is its socio-economic status?

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 or 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 you can quickly compile a listing of close neighbours who will probably share very similar characteristics to past and present good customers.

If you intend to carry out a Close Neighbour Campaign 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.

If your database is large use a professional profiling service to organise a local marketing campaign. These profiling services take your customer data and compare it to the UK population using one of a variety of geo-demographic or lifestyle tools in order to determine the customer's specific characteristics.

Visit: www.postcodeanywhere.co.uk they have a free service and lots of information on targeting and profiling.

If you have a client address list including postcodes see this information represented graphically on a postcode sector map.

Heat Map example: Heatmap 

Get a profile of your own neighbourhood, and see how it compares to other neighbourhoods. A good resource to gather socio-economic data on local communities.

UK Local Area Information