The Geographic Marketing “Beach”

The other day I made post in the forum pertaining to my old job as a Oyster Picker. Yeah, yeah…enough chuckles!

Anyways, within that post I mentioned that there were 4 aspects (the beach, the shell, the meat, the pearl) to a successful oyster business, and I tied them into their extremely close relation to Internet marketing. (You can read my original post here)

Today I am going to elaborate on the beach, or the geographic marketing epicenter of a successful campaign. This is post 1 or a 4 post series…and in the following posts I make I am going to be discussing the other components of an oyster (in terms of marketing) and hopefully it will give you a very strong grasp of how to market online.

“When you look for a beach you need to really analyze all of components of that area. You need to understand the true demographics of it. Is is easy to deliver product from that area…are the winds so high they will blow away your oysters, is it an area known for “red tide” in which there are seasonal times you cannot sell your poisonous oysters.”

The same goes for geographic locations for your marketing campaigns. Geography can make all the difference between a successful campaign and one that is really struggling.

In order to sell something online, you need to be in the right market.

Have you ever been at work and so darn hungry that you just went to the cafe next door? You see, the food doesn’t even need to be the best for this company to succeed if the office staff next door is large enough. A lot of people will have the same idea as you and because of the cafes geographic location, they are positioned to succeed.

Put this same cafe down a dark alley and watch it be out of business in a month. Conversely, if you have the best food in town but are in a jurisdiction that is difficult to travel to or where people are worried about crime, you are not going to be successful.

The exact same thing happens within the online marketing world. If you have a product you are promoting to a certain geographic area and these people can’t actually BUY that product from that area (due to credit card processing restrictions), you are wasting your damn time and money on getting traffic.

Think Clickbank (CB), one of the largest affiliate networks out there. Many people don’t realize that when they are getting traffic to promote Clickbank products, that some of it is wasted traffic…by that I mean they can’t buy ANY CB products due to the country they are in.

Paypal only allows payments from certain countries as well. If you are promoting a product that only accepts Paypal payment, then you may want to look into which countries are on the “safe list”.

https://www.paypal.com/worldwide/

And what about the “rich versus poor”. If you try to promote a 1980 Ford Pinto online to people that are billionaires you are wasting your money. Same goes for putting a Maserati ad in front of people who have a lower income. You might get some “looky loo’ers”, but you would not be anywhere near a successful campaign.

My recent case study:

I recently ran a test for the “make money online” promotion of an pure “squeeze page” the other day and ran it within all Countries & Territories. My goal was to simply get people to opt-in to a mailing list…at which time I could build a relationship with them, one that was ideally strong enough that they would purchase based on my recommendations.

The results:

80% of all my traffic came from India & Nigeria

The problem:

Most of these people were willing to join a list (that is free), but next to none of them could afford to buy anything. Sure these geographic regions would be great if you had a “free system” that you wanted to attract new people to…and they were willing to work hard, however they did not have adequate funds to make this campaign profitable.

The solution:

Target only countries that fit the geographic profile that would allow them to buy your product based on the demographics.

I edited the campaigns settings so that it would only show within countries with the purchasing power that I felt necessary to sell the products that I had within my back-end sequence. The results were as anticipated, much better. The pay-per-click price actually went up slightly, but the quality of lead was much more qualified. Conversions also increased drastically from the opt-in to sale ratio.

So in conclusion, the beach you choose is VERY important. You want to seek out the following criteria through research before promoting to a certain jurisdiction:

(a) Do they have the money to buy your product?
(b) Do they need money to buy your product?
(c) Do they want your product?
(d) Do they need your product?
(e) Are they capable of making the transaction you require?
(f) Do you run the risk of fraud?

If you can accurately assess each of these items, you will be much more successful with your promotions.

That’s all for today. I will complete part 2, 3, and 4 in the coming weeks.

Take care,