Broadcast marketing is dead! Or are those pronouncements premature?
Marketers stuck in the age of mass media are still trying to find their audience through broadcast marketing. The belief is that the more people they reach, the higher the chances of finding an audience. However, since we are steeped in the digital era now, it is possible to discover your audience, send hyper-targeted messages to them, and maximize the local reach. Say hello to geo-location targeting.
For marketing messaging to deliver its intended purpose and be useful, it must reach the right customer base. The marketing can be considered successful only when it caters to a specific target audience, including where they’re geographically located. This is where geo-targeting comes into play.
What Is Geo-Location Targeting?
Geo-targeting is a technology-enabled marketing concept that employs location data to deliver the most relevant message to the most relevant audience at the most opportune time. Geo-location targeting or geo-targeting employs the concept of targeting and segmentation to categorize the audience into groups based on their location. The marketing content and advertisements are adjusted post-segmentation and delivered to people within a certain radius based on behaviors and demographics.
Geo-location targeting helps organizations create stronger customer connections by delivering personalized, contextual, and relevant content. Unless organizations know the user demographics, such as gender, race, etc., and their location, creating personalized marketing messages becomes a gargantuan challenge.
Let’s take the example of a food delivery app. On a particularly rainy/cold/hot day, the app sends a notification to order food from a restaurant nearby. The restaurant targets customer who lives in the area on a day when the weather dictates most people to order in. This messaging plants the idea of ordering food from the restaurant since they live close by. What are the chances of the person placing an order? If such a message were to reach you, chances are you’d place that order.
Retail establishments also use geo-location marketing to occupy greater mind space and recall value with customers. Geo-targeting allows organizations to cater to a specific group of people based on their location and other factors like behaviors, interests, and demographics. This allows them to create more personalized content that might be more effective.
How Geo-Location Targeting Boosts Your Digital Advertising Strategy
All companies that want to improve the outcomes of their marketing and advertising strategies and want to expand their customer base must now leverage geo-location targeting, irrespective of their size.
Some of the clear advantages that geo-location targeting offers are:
Increase Customer Base and Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs
Businesses today are trying to expand their customer base by using advertising and marketing strategies to increase their reach. Geo-targeting is one of the most viable ways to make this happen.
Geo-targeting helps organizations reduce customer acquisition costs, supports increased conversions, and makes campaigns more cost-effective. Since the marketing and advertising content is directed to users who live or move about in a certain area, the content becomes more relevant to customers and reduces wasted impressions and clicks.
This allows organizations to target ads not only to people in a location but to people who’ve shown interest in a location, a product, or a service relevant to the business by combining demographics and other customer intelligence data.
Elevate Customer Experience
As customer experience becomes the final frontier for advertising, geo-targeting capabilities become crucial to develop the competencies that elevate it and drive competitiveness. Since the customer of today is well-versed in personalization, they demand no less from the messaging that reaches them.
Geo-targeting reaches customers wherever they are based on the individual users’ GPS and proximity to local “beacons”. It then employs automation to trigger relevant personalized ads, push notifications, or other content.
As mentioned above, geo-targeting combines location data with demographics and other customer intelligence data. This helps:
- Deliver personalized offers and information tailored to customers’ needs
- Allows marketers to deliver powerfully cohesive and personalized digital and in-store experiences
Boost Local SEO
Considering the immense popularity of smartphones and the increasing number of Google searches, boosting SEO becomes important for most businesses. Analysis reveals that 46% of all Google searches are seeking local information. It also shows that 88% of consumers doing a local search on their phone visit or call the store within a day.
Geo-targeting provides regionally appropriate search results and promotes local marketing and advertising initiatives. As such, it boosts local SEO and increases findability.
Further, geo-targeting helps maintain marketing and advertising ROI since there is no wasted traffic as no ads outside of the service area are sent to the customer. It thereby also ensures that only quality traffic comes to the store – online or brick-and-mortar.
Better traffic translates to more leads and increased conversions, and reduced bounce rates. It also increases visitors’ average time on site and consequently boosts SEO.
Build Brand-Defining Moments
Using geo-targeting to engage customers can create more brand-defining moments. This is because it creates the opportunity to engage customers when the time and place are most opportune.
A gaming site, for example, can create deep on-site game-day experiences using geo-targeting. Gaming fans can be sent personalized notifications paired with location awareness. The site can create personalized messages. These could include customized information on their favorite player, ticket-holder status, etc., and guide their open rates.
The same can be used to create a highly personalized digital experience for events or to send push notifications to ship targeted offers.
Drive More Clicks and Conversions
Geo-targeting gives companies the power to create relevant ads that convert customers. Think about a retail shop or a medical store that has operations in two locations that are half an hour to an hour apart. People from that location can go to either of the stores. Showing an ad to someone who is one mile from your business will be a lot more effective than showing an ad to someone who lives further away or in a different city.
With geo-targeting, the coffee shop can create tailored ads to appeal to customers. The audience also pays more attention since they are getting to see the location that is closest to them.
The Bottom Line
The benefits of geo-targeting in this hyper-competitive world cannot be overstated. However, looking at the benefits of geo-targeting is one thing and actually implementing a geo-targeted marketing strategy is another.
For example, a few of the many areas to care for include:
- Creating unique campaigns for each location
- Getting specific with your ad targeting
- Tracking where the traffic comes from
- Identifying and testing location-specific keywords and generic “near me” terms
- Giving location-based visuals and content and location options if you are unsure about customer geo
On the other hand, you can leverage our expertise and supercharge your marketing and advertising strategies with the geo-targeting advantage.
Connect with us to explore avenues to elevate the outcomes of your advertising and marketing initiatives.
