Targeting postal codes within a travel time

Local marketing can have a big impact on domestic brand awareness. Targeting audiences based on proximity and travel time allows marketers to tailor their messaging to each community, and to more effectively connect with the audiences they’re engaging. Smaller, more local companies can also use local marketing strategies to maximise the return on their marketing budgets.

Targeting postal codes based on their populations’ travel times to and from your store or business can help you capture your most promising audiences’ attention — it also takes the guesswork out of targeting based on proximity as distance isn’t always the deciding factor in the convenience of traveling from one place to another. Keep reading to learn more about taking your local marketing strategy to the next level with Spotzi.

Local Marketing: Filter and analyze postal codes based on travel time

The scope of your marketing campaign is not always one size fits all. Your average shopper will normally expect to endure a longer commute when picking up their perfect couch or TV vs. while doing their weekly grocery shopping. This is why our platform allows you to filter by custom travel times when targeting your best-fit customers.

Example
A small bakery’s marketing campaign intends to draw in the locals with promises of freshly baked bread and pastries. This bakery can now choose to divide its marketing budget and expenditure between audiences within a 15 minute commute of their bakery and audiences whose commutes extend beyond that. To do this, the bakery simply uses Spotzi to filter their surrounding postal codes based on their set travel times. This narrows down their catchment area to a list of more relevant postal codes. The aforementioned list can now be used to:

• Arrange direct mail campaigns
• Locate the best billboards or transit shelters for their OOH ads — these can even be used for directional marketing!
• Target their most local audiences with google or facebook ads.

Digital Marketing for Local Businesses

Digital marketing channels can be used to target audiences within a set travel time from your place of business. This, however, isn’t a standard targeting option within digital marketing tools such as Google, Bing, or Facebook — Most marketers can only unlock this strategy with the help of data analysts or GIS specialists.

Strategic distribution of your marketing budget is key when it comes to maximizing the return on your marketing efforts. Travel time filters allow you to focus a greater percentage of your campaign budget on your most promising audiences — you can then use other budget portions to explore your connection with other audiences and locate new areas of interest for your brand or business.

Audience Segmentation: Travel time and Consumer behaviour

When dealing with a large catchment area and its many consumers it pays to strategically divide a population into different types of audiences. This increases the precision of your marketing efforts and ensures that your resulting campaign strategies are much more targeted; we would, after all, expect to approach the targeting of a younger audience differently than that of a much older one.

How to divide your audience based on travel time?
Begin by mapping each postal code within your catchment area. Once your map is ready you may proceed to further divide this catchment area using different kinds of data. There are a number of options to choose from when it comes to using additional datasets:

• Point-of-Sale Data (POS): Collecting each customer’s postal code data once they make a purchase in your store will help you better understand the distribution of your customers across your catchment area.
• Ecommerce Data: Does your business use a webshop? Collecting the postal codes of your online customer base can help you see which areas you’ve most successfully targeted, as well as give you a starting point for a deeper analysis of your existing customers’ needs and habits.
• Demographic data: Data from sources such as Statistics Netherlands or the U.S Census Bureau can offer many insights into your target groups. These include breakdowns of a population’s age brackets, family compositions, and even average disposable incomes and purchasing power data.
• Consumer Behaviour Data: Consumer measurement data from trusted sources such as Vividata and GfK provide an in-depth look into the views, habits, and even purchasing plans of global consumers.
• Audience Segments: A streamlined approach to audience profiling. Globally relevant consumer characteristics (such as their housing, income, age, and more) are used to create ready-made consumer profiles.

Digital Marketing: Optimize Google and Facebook Ads using Travel Distance Filters

Use Spotzi’s travel distance filters to create targeted online campaigns, or continue to further categorize your most promising postal codes based on thousands of data filter options. Read our article on location targeting with Google Ads and Facebook Ads to learn more.