Geelong is Victoria's second city and the first regional step for most Melbourne networks. It wraps around a bay, reaches out to the Bellarine towns, and fills in the corridor towards Melbourne a little more every year. This page covers what a franchise marketing platform does for a Geelong network.
Amplaro is a digital franchise marketing platform: head office builds local campaigns once, and every Geelong franchise partner activates them for their own store, targeted to that store's real trade area rather than a circle on a map. For a Melbourne network expanding down the highway, the packages carry over unchanged; only the geography is new.
The general version of this page is what a franchise marketing platform is. This one is about Geelong: a bay in the middle of the map, weekender towns on the peninsula, and a customer base that can smell Melbourne creative with the suburb swapped.
The suburbs curve around Corio Bay, so a circle from a waterfront store spends a big slice on open water. Head the other way and the same circle covers the paddocks between the city and the Bellarine towns, or leaks down towards the Surf Coast, where the weekend crowds live somewhere else entirely on a Tuesday.
On the 150 Victorian zones in our benchmark, built from official suburb boundaries, a covering circle put a median 66% of its area outside the zone it was meant to serve. Fitted Meta targeting put 11.1% outside at 92.7% coverage, fitted Google 9.9% at 90.4%. The full method is on the zone benchmark, and how a polygon becomes an audience is on zones into ad audiences.
For Melbourne networks Geelong is the natural first step outside the metro, and it is a forgiving one only if the marketing feels local. Food, fitness and home services franchising are all established here, and the corridor back towards Melbourne keeps adding estates that some store has to own.
A fitted trade area includes Ocean Grove or Barwon Heads when the store really serves them, and skips the farmland in between. A radius cannot make that call. See delivery area targeting.
Estates keep filling in towards Melbourne's west. New stores import as a row, catalogues apply on day one, and neighbouring areas redraw without overlap. See rolling out.
The sector versions of this page start at franchise industries, from restaurants and QSR to automotive.
Head office builds campaign packages once: artwork in the brand font, offers, budgets, dates, guardrails. A Geelong partner signs in, picks a campaign, sets a budget inside the limits, and is live in minutes on Meta and Google with the store's own trade area as the audience. Organic posts to the store's own pages and printed flyers ride along in the same order flow.
Head office sees every campaign, every store and every dollar, including the stores that have launched nothing. The full flow is on how it works, and what the brand team keeps is on for head office.
Treat it as its own market that happens to share a state. Geelong customers notice when a brand runs Melbourne creative with the suburb swapped. On the platform the campaign packages carry over unchanged, which frees the budget and attention to make the targeting and the offer properly local, which is the part Geelong actually rewards.
The city wraps around the bay, so a circle from a store near the waterfront spends a large slice on open water. Push further out and the same circle covers paddocks between Geelong and the Bellarine towns. On 150 Victorian benchmark zones a covering circle put a median 66% of its area outside the zone, and bay plus farmland edges are exactly how that happens. Full method on the benchmark page.
Sometimes, and that is the point of drawing rather than sliding a radius. Ocean Grove, Barwon Heads and the other Bellarine towns are their own communities with their own habits. A fitted trade area can include the towns a store really serves and skip the farmland in between, something no radius slider can express.
The new store imports as a row, gets the whole campaign catalogue on day one, and the neighbouring trade areas are redrawn so nobody pays for overlap. Growth corridors are where radius circles collide first, because every store's circle reaches into the new estates. Fitted areas hand each estate to exactly one store.
The hub for this topic is the franchise marketing platform guide, and the measured case against circles is the zone benchmark. Every city breaks a radius differently:
The benchmark says what circles do to typical Victorian zones. Your Geelong shapes are their own case, and fitting them takes one demo.