Location, Location, Location. 📍

We’ve all heard that short phrase, mostly as it relates to regional brick and mortar opportunities for booming business operations. Consider your marketing efforts the same way, with potential to really have an impact promoting your products/services in specific regions. Capturing the right audience, with the right message, in the right location can equate to hitting the prospect jackpot.

But, ya gotta be sure ya audience is where you say they are. or it could be costly – and no jackpot 😞

Ok, so let’s say for your next field event promo the messaging is on point and the audience is nailed down. But, you just can’t quite be sure the location information on your lead data is organized well enough to pull in accurate list counts. There are mismatched and misspelled values for city, state, country etc. and you struggle with having to remember the various value combinations for the same locations needed to reach the right people. Well, for starters, this can be avoided on the front-end by locking down all forms with standardized geo field picklists that a lead can choose from and enter your database in a more organized fashion.

Consider these suggestions when formatting fields:

• Country: Standard values should always be spelled out when displayed on forms and stored on records to avoid any human/system errors when automating processes
• State: Standard values should either be spelled or abbreviated, and consistently formatted regarding how they’re displayed on forms and stored on lead records upon conversion
• Region: An optional field, but if used, it’s recommended to only use in combination with State (State/Region) to show country specific state-like values when country is selected on forms

Having your bases covered here on the lead capture front is critical to maintaining quality data. Whatever formatting you choose for your field values, be sure to align with any automated processes and routing rules that are in place to sync between systems. See just how you can optimize your forms to ensure consistency across geo data with our step-by-step Marketo Form Field Setup instructions.

Once ya got’m, there’s a great place to set them for quick reference later – in a good ol’ segmentation 👍

Segments work great when targeting specific global regions that encompass many countries and sub-regions, and if used within Marketo, offer dynamic functionality with automatic list updates in real time. They can help avoid including the wrong or even leaving out countries by mistake on communications, by including all countries that make up each global region, in each segment.  

Depending on location of company operations, leads can be segmented into the following global region groups:  

• AMER - United States/Canada
• EMEA - Europe, Middle East, and Asian countries
• APAC - Asia-Pacific countries
• LATAM - Latin American countries
• ANZ - Australia/New Zealand

Knowing where your leads are located and where to focus strategic efforts is vital to targeting and generating quality leads for your business. And knowing how to properly organize and segment them based on that geo data is just as important. The CS2 Global Location Information & Standardization Guide will help enable you to capture and segment your leads, and ensure they're always appended with the correct geo data.