Grant Shippey, CEO of Amorphous, talks about enabling a marketing strategy that is geographically focused on small, localised pockets of consumers.
“The big difference between traditional marketing and hyper-local marketing is essentially Geography; it’s about how small an area you actually want to talk to,” says Shippey. Television has traditionally targeted markets at a national level, whereas news, print, and magazine have provided a platform for regionally based targeting. “We’re now pioneering a way in which you can target people in a specific street or house. Traditionally this was done with brochure drops, or cleverly done outdoor purchases (billboards/banners), but nowadays we are doing it with technology,” Shippey explains.
Amorphous has a database of around 22 million financially active South Africans, who have been geo-mapped by the company’s technology – right down to the physical location of where each individual lives. As an example, Shippey refers to Nando’s in Parktown North who wanted only to target people within a 2km radius of the store. The Amorphous technology allows marketers to pinpoint that specific audience with two main benefits: (1) identifying who actually lives in a specific location, and (2) facilitating messaging directly to them. The technology provides largely mobile communication at this point, with SMS, MMS and automated voice messaging (pre-recorded radio spots for example) available.
Shippey maintains however that marketers should approach hyper-local marketing in the same way that they approach most strategies: with a goal, an objective and a way to measure the outcome. He says, “Where it gets tricky is if you were a national manager for a retailer with a hundred branches, actually understanding the nuances of the Roodepoort (Johannesburg) store customers versus the Strand Street (Cape Town) customers becomes an issue of ‘samples of one’. So we tend to come up with a goal and do an analysis of who actually lives around your locations and then what makes the different locations unique in terms of gender, language, income split, etc.”
Watch the full video interview with Grant Shippey here:
