Let's see a quick show of hands... who knows what targeted advertising is? That's what I thought; many of you've heard the words but don't know how it applies to our community.

Have you ever received an invitation to a weekly steppers class or event in a city across the country (or at least in a location you're not even remotely near?) Sure you have, we all have on Facebook.

The person doing the advertisement has "friended" every stepper they could find on the social site and now they are going to advertise with the hope some of it sticks and people will attend their set or class.

That's targeted advertising in a nutshell (even though the person doing the advertising only targeted "all steppers")... had the marketer taken the time to create a list of people in geographic proximity to the event or class they would be able to tailor their event description to that exact market.

Of course many of these would-be marketers have no idea of where you are mainly because it would take effort to break down their friend lists by location. Facebook knows where you are, Google knows where you are but not the steppers marketer... they just throw the info out there.

Facebook and Google use a lot of advanced tools to see where you are so they can advertise directly to you and amongst the tools they use is geotracking. It's a tool where they trace your computers internet address to where it connects to the web. This tells them what city you're in and that gives them an idea where you're at so they can advertise products and services for your city to you.
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I've played with geotracking and I have to say it's not all that accurate especially if you are connected using a wireless carrier (more and more people are). There needs to be more. Ideally an opt in list of people who identify their location to receive specific information about stepping and its related activities.

The key word is opt-in and unfortunately many marketers just grab email addresses and names and start pushing stuff at us. It's spam and one of these days someone is going to get busted but that's another story isn't it.

People in the steppers community have an interest in what happens in other cities but it's only a fleeting interest at best. What's happening closest to us is what is most important to us and we shouldn't forget that.

Advertising and promotion and party planning should always start at home and should benefit home before anywhere else. We should support our home community by going to the classes and events and by building the community instead of scheming to see how we can draw more people from other cities to support what we can't.

I'm not saying don't take that "steppers vacation" because I don't think anyone would be able to stop you anyway... just remember where you live. Target your efforts locally before thinking about going national.

If your local party has less than a thousand people attending regularly you probably shouldn't be inviting the entire country to gather in your city. There should be a base in your stepping community large enough to handle (to dance with and network with) an additional thousand or two people in order for your event to really work as it should.

Like it or not our efforts should be geared toward building a large and strong local market and it all starts with targeting new people where you live along with the ones you already market to at home.

Steppers song of the day (#stepperssongoftheday)

Today's song of the day is "Madame Butterfly" by Tavares .

Post some comments... give the song some love... tell me if you love it or hate it. Would you add it to your playlist? Would you step to it? If you like it click the "Like Button." Join the music group! Here's the link: https://www.facebook.com/groups/steppers.music Want to see our list of music to step to? Click here. #steppersmusiclist
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