Geo Targeting

10 Simple Steps To Improve Geo-Location Marketing To Reach Your Target Audiences

Geo-targeting almost doubles the outcome of all kinds of promotional techniques from email marketing to paid search. If data from Local Search Association is to be believed, the revelation regarding geo-targeted marketing methods is startling. The CTR of geo-targeted mobile ads was higher than the industry benchmarks for all verticals.

Geo-targeting involves delivering content to a specific group of consumers that reside or that are present in a geographic area. At a basic level, geo-targeting restricts reach to a limited area but at advanced level, it helps determine what consumers want and whether they are interested in the offers. It shows that location can provide much deeper and more identifiable information.

Here are 10-practical ways to geo-targeting by identifying location to reach out to targeted audiences

  1. Find a venue where your target audience will have specific wants or needs

Shopping malls, universities and stadiums and even airports are venues that have the potential to become source of targeted audiences. Similarly dance clubs and bars could be venues for geo-targeting customers. But you need using customer characteristics to target audiences in these venues. For instance take a dance club that can attract college going university students. Similarly airport can be a venue for targeting business travelers looking for high-end dining options.

  1. Exclude locations where your target audience will not be

Geo-targeting also includes the exclusion of areas. It seems strange but true. Exclusion is as important as inclusion. And you might need excluding a location that you’ve earlier included in your list of geo-targeting. Let’s understand the exclusion of areas with an example.

Dance clubs that can find their audiences in universities will find that there is no benefit in targeting universities during summer breaks. Similarly, high-end restaurants won’t find customers during weekends when more leisure travelers use airports than business class.

Location exclusion can also keep a tab over your spending on ads. By including this factor, you can avoid high demand target venues that have high ad rates. This factor can filter your search for venues and get you closer to your targeted customers.

  1. Define a radius by distance or time around your store or an area of interest

Geo-fencing marks boundary for delivering the ads and it is beneficial in promoting location-based searches like store locator. A coffee-shop can find customers within a 1-mile radius or it can extend the perimeter to included commercial areas to target office executives looking for a quick coffee-break while on-the-way to their offices. Similarly, the geo-targeting could be used to hunt for customers in a competitor’s location.

Perimeters can also be defined with time instead of physical location. Residential societies coming up close to commercial places can woo office goers that commute long distances and hotels can attract customers looking for hotel facilities within a walking distance of a couple of minutes. There is an application TravelTime that is developed to search audiences by time rather than distance. A developer of the app is iGeolise.

  1. Adjust your bids on ads to prioritize better locations

It is a concern for geo-targeting as advertising in low-volume locations isn’t beneficial. If your overall CTR is 10% and you’re getting only 100 visitors from geo-targeting then only 10 visitors from 100 viewers will convert into sales. Here you can try optimizing the bids; focus on high cost bids in preferable locations and choose low-cost bids for low-volume areas. These monetary adjustments will improve your traffic and sales.

  1. Use location-specific keywords for paid search ads

Geo-targeting is a vast area that includes more than physical search. As we’ve seen earlier that location specific search can reveal choice of customer, you’ve to be aware about needs of your audiences. Adding a landmark like popular venues or using zip codes or city name in the ads could be useful in bringing targeted customers to your store.

All the people available in the geo-target area aren’t your customers hence filtering your search could be beneficial in locating the audiences. People search businesses with name like coffee shop uptown and Austin gyms to find information on points of interests.

10 Simple Steps To Improve Geo-Location Marketing To Reach Your Target Audiences

  1. Predict your audience by geography

Geo-targeting is the game and practice of targeting audiences that are interested in a specific business. The practice involves categorizing customers in age groups; income bracket, food-habit, culture and even religion. It is like creating specific target zones within a large market. Having complete information on who your customers are and matching the ads with time and place of their presence is the only way to succeed in geo-targeting.

  1. Analyze consumer behavior and preference from past locations visited

Location history of customers can be of great help in geo-targeting. The history can provide interesting facts on the places the consumers targeted visited in past. The ads can be optimized and offers made to the customers that searched information and also visited the businesses like yours.

  1. Take advantage of geographic specific events

Weather, holidays, festivals and celebrations are also great opportunities for expanding reach and making sales. Hardware stores selling snow blowers can make more sales during winter season. Similarly vacationers can be targeted during holiday season.

  1. Use location specific landing pages to provide relevant content

In geo-targeting, it becomes very important to be very specific in your approach. Just getting clicks isn’t sufficient as the viewers should also become customers. Choose landing page according to intent of the searcher.

  1. Discover location intent by search history

Targeting customers with ads based on search history of the customers could be more beneficial than the ads based on physical location of consumers. A person looking for tickets to a specific event will be interested in your offer, if you are selling tickets and it hardly matters whether the person targeted is within your geo-fencing.

Effectiveness of geo-targeted ads is expected to improve with availability and improvement in accuracy of local data. Mobile uses have already surpassed PC uses in search marketing. Today the majority of searches are conducted on mobiles than PCs.

Conclusion

Geo-targeting relies on many factors including physical area, time and intent of the consumers. Business of all verticals can take advantage of geo-fencing, if they can analyze the data about targeted customers. Today there is an app for targeting consumers using time as perimeter, in future, we can expect more such apps that can filter data for more accurate searches on customers.

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Udit Khanna is a Digital Marketing Course professional at Expert Training Institute, an expert in Digital Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, Pay Per Click, Social Media, etc. who helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers. Previously, Udit worked as a marketing professional for various startups and tech companies. He graduated with B.Sc from IGNOU with a dual degree in Business Administration (Marketing & Finance).

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