Are you having trouble reaching your desired customers in specific locations? Then, you need to adopt the best practices for geotargeting marketing. Get it right, and you’ll get more sales, foot traffic, and expand brand recognition.
In this article, we’ll share the best practices and the benefits of geotargeting marketing. This will help you understand how to start to beat the competition. We’ll also share what to look for in a geotargeting platform that can assist you with creating effective marketing campaigns.
Table of Contents
What Is Geotargeting Marketing?
Geotargeting marketing is a strategy that involves delivering targeted ads or promotional messages to individuals based on their geographic location. This allows businesses to tailor their marketing efforts to specific regions, cities, neighborhoods, or even individual locations.
Here are some of the top advantages of using geographic locations in your marketing:
- Increase foot traffic: You may experience increased foot traffic to your physical location after a geo-targeted marketing campaign. You can monitor your foot traffic before and after to see the difference.
- Targeted advertising: Geographic targeting allows you to reach specific audiences based on the users’ locations. Hence, your direct marketing efforts towards potential customers in relevant areas. This precision targeting increases the effectiveness of your advertising campaigns and maximizes your return on investment.
- Local SEO: Including geographic locations in your marketing content can improve your visibility in local search results. This can help you beat competitors that aren’t using local SEO in their website optimization. Furthermore, good local SEO makes it easy for customers to find your business online, which promotes a good experience.
- Market segmentation: Geographic targeting enables you to segment your audience. This allows you to tailor your marketing strategies to different regions or markets. For example, you can segment your marketing based on different cities or neighborhoods.
- Relevance: By tailoring your marketing messages to specific geographic locations, you can make your content more relevant and relatable to your target consumers. This personalized approach enhances engagement and speaks directly to their local interests.
Geotargeting vs. Geofencing
You may see mentions of geotargeting and geofencing frequently in location-based marketing. As defined previously, geotargeting allows you to target specific locations. You’ll do this by entering the names of countries, cities, or neighborhoods.
In comparison, geofencing allows you to target specific locations by drawing a perimeter on a map to target people. This method arguably gives you more control over target audiences. However, drawing the perimeter on the map for each location may also take more time.
Geotargeting Marketing Platforms: Top 5 Features To Consider
When looking for geotargeting marketing platforms, you must find one with features that align with your goals. This ensures you can execute the location-based marketing strategies that grow your business.
1. Integration With Other Platforms
You may already use other marketing platforms with a lot of customer and sales data. Ideally, you’ll have the ability to sync your existing platform to a newly added geotargeting one.
Therefore, you can hit the ground running by taking advantage of the hard work you did to harvest customer data.
2. Targeting Resolution
Targeting resolution refers to how accurately you can target your audience. For example, some marketing platforms may only offer you the ability to target cities.
In comparison, higher resolutions allow you to target specific roads in neighborhoods. The latter is ideal if you want complete control over target locations to drive the relevance of your marketing campaigns.
Also, you’ll want geofencing tools to create a virtual boundary to target audiences. This allows you to manually specify the areas of a map where you want to run advertisements.
3. Real-Time Monitoring
Real-time monitoring is an excellent feature for keeping an eye on the performance of your campaign as it happens. There are several advantages to real-time monitoring with geotargeting advertising, which are as follows:
- Immediate feedback: Real-time monitoring allows businesses to receive immediate feedback on the performance of their geolocation marketing campaigns. They can track engagement, click-through rates (CTR), conversions, and store visits. Hence, you can make adjustments and optimize campaigns on the fly.
- Optimized resource allocation: Monitoring your geotargeting campaigns in real-time lets you figure out what’s working and driving down your return on investment (ROI). Therefore, you can avoid losing more money on negative ROI campaigns via optimization. It helps incorporate AI-based suggestions to help you make the right improvements.
- Competitive advantage: Real-time monitoring gives businesses a competitive advantage by enabling them to react quickly to market dynamics and changing consumer preferences. Therefore, companies can outmaneuver competitors and capitalize on emerging opportunities by staying agile and adaptive. You can even do this in specific ZIP codes where you notice trends.
4. Compliance and Privacy
Prioritize platforms that adhere to data privacy regulations and best practices for user consent and data protection. This is particularly true when collecting and using location data for marketing purposes. This ensures that the platform complies with relevant laws to mitigate risks and maintain trust with your audience.
5. Customer Support and Training
Evaluate the level of customer support, training, and resources provided by the platform. That’s because you may need assistance to set up, manage, and optimize geo-targeted campaigns effectively.
Also, look for access to knowledgeable support staff, tutorials, documentation, and training materials. This can help you maximize the platform’s capabilities and make it easier for beginners to start.
Top 3 Methods for Geotargeting
You can define the type of geotargeting you’re doing by the size of your target area. Here are the top 3 geotargeting methods that you can add to your marketing strategy:
- Countries: Targeting audiences at the national level may work for businesses that sell internationally. However, you may want to limit the countries based on one speaking a particular language. Also, country-based geotargeting is handy when you have a limited scope for where you can deliver internationally.
- Regions in countries: You can reach large audiences within specific countries by narrowing down the region. For example, you may want to target a specific state in the U.S. to optimize your marketing efforts. This is particularly handy if your products are in demand only in specific states. For instance, equipment to deal with snow in states toward the north of the country.
- Local radius: You may want to focus on a local radius for your marketing to increase footfall to specific locations. This ensures that you only advertise to viewers in your local area and within a short drive of your store.
4 Best Practices for Geotargeting Ads
Do you want to run geotargeting ads for your marketing campaigns? Then, you must follow the best practices to optimize your engagement and ROI. With the right approach, you can minimize your learning curve and start making a profit sooner.
Read on for four best practices to craft the best geo-marketing strategy.
1. Define Your Target Audience
You’ll need to start by defining your target audience, and you can do this based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and geographic location. Understanding who you’re trying to reach will help you create more effective ad campaigns.
Start by determining the geographic areas where you want to target your marketing efforts. For example, consider factors such as location-based sales data, customer demographics, market research, and business objectives. This will help you identify regions or locations with the highest potential for growth or impact.
Additionally, stay informed about local market trends in each geographic area. Jumping on trends as they appear can skyrocket your ROI. Also, some trends come and go fast, so you’ll need to act quickly to make the most of them.
2. Use Location-Based Keywords
Incorporate location-based keywords into your ad copy, headlines, and descriptions to make your ads more relevant to users based in specific geographic areas. This can help improve ad performance and increase engagement since your ads mostly reach the target audience.
There are several ways that you can research location-based keywords, which are as follows:
- Seed keywords: Begin by brainstorming seed keywords relevant to your business, products, services, and target audience. These can be general keywords related to your industry or specific terms that describe your offerings.
- Keyword research tools: Utilize keyword research tools such as Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Ubersuggest to generate keyword ideas. These also help you identify search volumes, competition levels, and related keywords for your target locations. You’ll typically need to enter seed keywords to begin your search.
- Analyze competitor keywords: Research your competitors and analyze the keywords they’re targeting in their content, ads, and local listings. Ideally, go after the top competitors that have winning advertising campaigns. They may have spent a lot of resources uncovering the best keywords you can leverage.
- Consider long-tail keywords: Incorporate long-tail keywords into your research since they have less competition and can be more specific to local search intent. Long-tail keywords typically contain three or more words, and the top competitors can overlook them. This means you’ll have less difficulty ranking for them.
- Review local search queries: Review local search queries and user-generated content (UGC) on platforms like Google My Business (GMB), Yelp, and TripAdvisor. This helps identify common phrases and keywords used by local consumers.
3. Set Specific Targeting Parameters
Use advanced targeting options to set specific parameters for your geotargeting ads, such as radius targeting, zip code targeting, or targeting by city or region. This allows you to hone in on the areas of the location of your target audience.
However, the platform may limit the quality of your targeting parameters, such as the platform, plugin, or app you’re using. Therefore, you need to find a toolkit that offers you the geotargeting parameters that support your marketing vision.
4. Monitor and Adjust Campaigns
Regularly monitor the performance of your geotargeting ad campaigns and make adjustments as needed based on real-time data and insights. Furthermore, experiment with different targeting parameters to determine where your target audience lives.
Here are a few ideas for how you can efficiently monitor and adjust your location-targeted marketing campaigns:
- Establish key performance indicators (KPIs): Choose KPIs aligned with your campaign objectives. This includes CTR, conversion rates, cost per acquisition (CPA), return on ad spend (ROAS), or engagement metrics. These metrics are benchmarks for evaluating campaign performance and determining whether you need adjustments.
- Set up tracking and analytics: Implement tracking tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or other analytics platforms to monitor campaign performance in real-time. Then, track important metrics related to user behavior, engagement, and conversions. This will help you gain insights into how your campaigns are performing.
- Test and experiment: Conduct A/B tests to experiment with different campaign variables such as ad creatives, messaging, targeting criteria, or bidding strategies. Test one variable at a time to isolate the impact and determine which variations drive the best results.
- Adjust bidding and budget allocation: Monitor your campaign budgets and bidding strategies to ensure optimal allocation of resources. Additionally, adjust bids and budgets based on performance data so you can make the most of your available resources.
Geotargeting Marketing: Is It Worth the Cost?
Marketing with geotargeting is an excellent strategy for businesses that need to define their audience based on physical location. This includes physical location businesses and those serving specific countries, states, cities, or neighborhoods.
Overall, it’s an excellent tool for improving marketing ROI and reaching the right audiences for your products.
Now that you understand geotargeting marketing, you can begin implementing the strategies. Start with the basic strategies, then expand to more advanced methods. Your competitors might already use geotargeting in ads, so you must adapt to avoid losing out.
Are you looking for a tool to help with your geotargeting ads? Then, choose geoPlugin; it’s the easiest way to geolocate your visitors. So what are you waiting for? Sign up today and begin using geoPlugin to help with your marketing campaigns!
