At Place Marketing Partners, a big part of our motivation is to make place marketing more strategic. This means ensuring that all our place marketing activities are focused on achieving defined, and ideally measurable, marketing goals. Ultimately, for the places we’re promoting, it means attracting more of the right kinds of people and businesses, with the economic and social benefits that follow.
This emphasis on more strategic place marketing is based on a simple observation - that too much of the place branding and place marketing we see is unstrategic. Place brands are developed with the general aim of improving perceptions of a place. But all too often these exercises don’t start in the right place, by asking and answering the right questions, including:
- Whose perceptions do we want to change?
- What do they want from our place?
- Once we’ve changed their perceptions, what actions do we want them to take?
If we don’t start here - by understanding our target audiences and their motivations - we’re likely to invest in place branding that pleases us (our organisation or partnership, for example) but is likely to be of little relevance and interest to the businesses and people we need to attract.
The same goes for the ‘stories’ we tell and the information we share through our place marketing. If we don’t start by understanding our audiences, we’re likely to collect and tell stories that make us feel good about a place we already know and love, but leave them thinking: ‘what has any of this got to do with me?’
So, strategic place marketing begins with clearly defined and ideally measurable goals. And it achieves those goals by identifying its target audiences, understanding their needs, and responding to them, so they’re more likely to take the actions we want them to take - contacting us or our partners, for example.
And being strategic in our place marketing has another important benefit. It helps us to demonstrate a return on our place marketing investments, so all parties involved know we’re delivering value for our organisation, our location, and our place partnership.
