Which stories should we tell through our place marketing, and why should we tell them?
Places, whether they be towns, cities or regions, offer a wealth of stories from diverse perspectives. But which ones should we choose to tell through our place marketing, and why?
Sometimes, place marketing campaigns tell all sorts of stories about the place in question, but without any apparent structure - so it’s unclear why they’re being told or who they’re for.
But if we’re more strategic in our place marketing, the question of which stories to tell and which ones to leave untold will be much easier to answer.
The first step in strategic place marketing is to define our goals, including:
Which audiences of businesses and people are we trying to attract?
Once we’ve answered that question, we can move on to the next one:
What are each audience’s needs and drivers with regard to places, and how can we respond to them effectively?
Businesses may need a location for their new office or factory, driven by maximising return on investment (ROI). The ‘stories’ we tell them should, therefore, be rich in valuable location data, enabling primarily rational, financially motivated decision making.
Families, on the other hand, may need a place to live, driven in part by rational factors like housing costs and affordability, but also by more emotional factors, like ‘feeling it home’ or ’loving the place’.
When we take a strategic approach to our place marketing, these insights can inform the stories we tell, who we tell them to, where we tell them, and how we tell them - our tone of voice and the content formats we use - to respond to the place choice drivers of different, carefully targeted audience segments.
And every story we tell can be associated with a specific, measurable marketing goal, helping us to achieve a return on our own investment - in more strategic place marketing.
