Exercise 5: Where should you focus your resources?
The Sainsbury Centre in Norwich captured the names and addresses of people who attended the Pacific Encounters exhibition and asked to join the free mailing list. They represent roughly 10% of the 14,000 visitors to the exhibition.
They analysed the 1,304 people using their postcodes.
The first part of a postcode made up of letters rather than numbers is the postal area:
NR4 7TJ
PE9 2DL
NG31 6PZ
B5 4TB
Postal areas are huge so are only useful for telling roughly where in the UK people are from.
A postal district is the bit of the postcode before the gap:
NR4 7TJ
PE9 2DL
NG31 6PZ
B5 4TB
There are on average 8,000 households in a postal district.
A postal sector includes the first digit after the gap and on average contains 2,500 households. It is more of a bite-sized chunk and is often used for targeting audiences in arts marketing.
NR4 7TJ
PE9 2DL
NG31 6PZ
B5 4TB
A whole postcode contains on average just 15 households.
The Sainsbury Centre analysed people according to their postal area and then mapped them using their whole postcodes. These are the results.
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Heather says:
I think they should spend almost all their marketing resources close to home. Of course it’s interesting that some of the visitors who were keen enough to want to join the mailing list live as far away as Glasgow and Plymouth but 41% have addresses within a 10 minute drivetime of the Sainsbury Centre and 71% are from the NR postal area. The close up map shows that there is lots of potential for getting more people who live within a 10 minute drivetime.
The distant visitors are clearly very interested in the visual arts so the Sainsbury Centre could perhaps look at getting more of the same kinds of people through editorial coverage in specialist publications.
