Toowoomba is a regional hub, which means its real catchment is not its suburbs. It is the suburbs plus the Darling Downs towns that drive in for the big shop, the appointment, the weekend. This page covers what a franchise marketing platform does for a Toowoomba network, drive-in catchment included.
Amplaro is a digital franchise marketing platform: head office builds local campaigns once, and every Toowoomba franchise partner activates them for their own store, targeted to that store's real catchment rather than a circle on a map. The partner picks a campaign, a budget and a date. The brand, the artwork and the spend limits are already locked by head office.
The general version of this page is what a franchise marketing platform is. This one is about Toowoomba: a hub whose customers drive in from a long way out, an escarpment that closes one side of the map, and a city quietly becoming a multi store market.
In Sydney the problem is a radius reaching too far past a small trade area. In Toowoomba it is the reverse: the real catchment includes towns thirty or forty minutes out across the Downs, with paddocks in between. A radius wide enough to reach those towns drowns the budget in empty country. A fitted area does what a circle cannot: it includes Highfields, the drive-in towns and the city's own suburbs, and skips the space between them.
On the 150 Queensland zones in our benchmark, built from official suburb boundaries, a covering circle put a median 63.9% of its area outside the zone it was meant to serve, against 11.5% for fitted Meta targeting at 92.7% coverage. Method and numbers on the zone benchmark; the plain-language version is radius vs delivery zone.
Toowoomba is one of the biggest inland cities in the country, with franchising strong in food, home services, automotive and childcare. The suburbs keep spreading, and networks that ran one store here are opening seconds and thirds.
A fitted catchment includes the Downs towns a store really serves and skips the paddocks. See delivery area targeting.
When the city gets its next store, catchments redraw so each owns its side of town plus its share of the drive-in towns. No shared auctions.
The sector versions of this page start at franchise industries, from automotive to childcare and education.
Head office builds campaign packages once: artwork in the brand font, offers, budgets, dates, guardrails. A Toowoomba 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 catchment as the audience. Organic posts to the store's own pages and printed flyers ride along in the same order flow, which suits a market where the local paper and the shopfront still matter.
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.
Yes, and this is where drawing beats sliding. A Toowoomba store's real catchment often includes towns thirty or forty minutes out that treat the city as their shopping trip, with nothing but paddocks in between. A fitted area can include those towns and skip the paddocks. A radius big enough to reach them would waste most of its budget on empty country.
Increasingly multi store. The city is one of the biggest inland cities in the country and the suburbs keep spreading west and south. When a second or third store opens, the catchments are redrawn so each store owns its side of town plus its share of the drive-in towns, and the stores stop bidding on each other from day one. See rolling out.
The city sits on top of the Great Dividing Range, with the escarpment dropping away to the east. A circle drawn from an eastern suburb spends its far side on the slopes and the valley floor, where the store's customers do not live. It is the same lesson as every coastal city, with bush instead of water: hard edges beat straight-line distance.
The benchmark used 150 zones built from official Queensland suburb boundaries from across the state. On those zones a covering circle put a median 63.9% of its area outside the zone, against 11.5% for fitted Meta targeting at 92.7% coverage. An inland hub with an escarpment on one side and farmland on the others fits that pattern exactly. Full method on the benchmark page.
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 Queensland zones. A drive-in catchment is its own case, and fitting your actual shapes takes one demo.