Geotargeting is highly effective in bringing new consumers to your business. It allows you to deliver personalized content to your target audience, increasing their chances of visiting your brand.
What is geotargeting? Technology has advanced to the extent that you can run your ads and target people according to their job status, gender, age group, location, etc. When you target people based on their area, it is called geotargeting.
We’ve crafted an ultimate guide to location targeting from which you’ll learn how to use geotargeting and its importance for your business.
Importance of Geotargeting for Your Business
Effective geotargeting comes with numerous benefits for you and your customers. It helps you enhance customer experience, encouraging your consumers to buy more frequently from your store.
Here’s how location targeting is essential for your business.
1. Customized Content for Your Target Audience
People love personalized content. When they find your content relatable, they are more likely to engage with your advertisement. The more engagement your posts get, the more audience they will be exposed to. Moreover, customized content builds a positive reputation for your brand, shows your customers you value them, and helps build brand credibility.
Location targeting enables you to create personalized content for your target audience. When you know in which location your ad will be seen, you can easily create content according to that location’s culture, events, seasonal products, etc.
2. Better Return on Investment
When you run regular ads, they are shown to people in every location. For instance, your business sells snowboards. You advertise without selecting the location of your audience. Your ad is shown to numerous people, including the residents of Florida and Texas. Every American knows that displaying snowboard ads in those regions is useless. Therefore, people in those regions will most probably ignore your advertisement without a second thought, ceasing you from gaining the most benefit from the money you spent on marketing.
Location targeting will allow you to reap the most benefit from the campaign by only showing your ads in the regions where there is a chance of conversion. This also makes location targeting one of the most budget-friendly marketing techniques.
3. Builds Authority
Targeting a specific area will make you a go-to business for that region. For instance, your advertisement campaign targets people within 20 miles of your store’s location. If your products or services are helpful for your customers, they will come to your store when they need anything your business sells. They might even suggest your brand to others as the best in a particular location.
4. It enables You to Hide Your Ads from Your Competition
Location targeting enables you to hide your advertisement campaign from competitors by excluding their location. This will cease them from stealing your strategies and giving you a point over them.
How Does Geotargeting Work?
Ever wondered why applications ask for your location? It’s reasonable when the Uber app asks you to turn your location on. But doesn’t it seem weird when your gaming app sends a notification asking you to switch on your GPS? Well, that’s one way application creators earn money from you even if you don’t make in-app purchases. When you switch on your GPS, they access your data (location) and sell it to marketers who use it for geotargeting.
Not just mobile apps, websites get access to your location as well. They can learn in which region you live by your IP address.
Tips to Use Geotargeting Effectively
Geotargeting can be highly fruitful only when used right. Here are some tips for incorporating into your geotargeting campaign to increase the chances of a better return on investment.
1. Use Your Keywords Carefully
People from different locations have different vocabularies. For example, Californians call the soft drink “a soda,” while the residents of Minnesota call it “pop.” Remember how the purpose of geotargeting is to personalize content? Vocabulary is essential when you’re customizing content for a specific region.
Here’s another example. Suppose you own a restaurant in Seattle. When you’re running an ad for it, be specific. The residents of Seattle most probably won’t search for a restaurant like “best restaurants in Seattle.” They will be straightforward with their query, such as, “best restaurants in ‘their area name.’” Therefore, it’s crucial to include the City name and the area you’re located in. Remember, you must be specific but not too specific. This will lead to excluding many people from your geotargeting campaign that could be your potential customers.
2. Don’t Distribute Your Budget Equally
Distributing your budget equally amongst all your target locations can be a mistake. If one region reacts better to your ads than the other, you must spend more money on the area with a better response.
If you think spreading more word about your business in the region that isn’t responding well to your ads might help, you may be wrong. Why? Some regions under your target location may not be suitable for your products. For example, even if Gucci spent its entire marketing budget displaying ads in low-income areas, it still won’t get a good response.
3. Look for the Upcoming Events
Suppose you run a cab business, and there’s a football game in your region. You can run particular geotargeted ads (Facebook and Google allow you to do that) to tell people about your service in that area. Many people attending the game will need your assistance to reach the stadium. And when they see your ad explicitly mentioning the name of that area or stadium, they are more likely to book a cab from your business. That’s how you benefit from events.
4. Go Time-Specific
You must consider running time-specific ads along with the location to drive more sales to your brick-and-mortar store. Consider optimizing your bids to show up when your store is open. You can also optimize them not to display when you close your shop.
Further, you can optimize your bid to reach people one or two hours before you’re open for business.
Platforms like Facebook and Google allow you to schedule your ads for time-specific targeting.
5. Accept Payments in Multiple Currencies
Accepting payments in multiple currencies is essential if you’re doing business with audiences worldwide. This will contribute positively to your customer’s experience, encouraging them to visit your store more frequently.
6. Highlight Your Unique Selling Point
Image taken from Strikinly’s user’s website
You won’t be alone in an area selling a product or service. More businesses will be similar to yours, meaning your target audience will have an option. Your unique selling point is the feature of your business that your competition doesn’t offer. It gives your consumer a reason to visit your company, not your competitor’s store.
In your geotargeting ads, ensure you highlight what your company stands for, what you offer that most people don’t, and, most importantly, how your unique selling point will benefit the buyer.
How Does Strikingly Contribute to Making Your Geotargeting Campaign a Success?
Image taken from Strikingly
When you run geotargeted ads, you will include a link to your website. For that, you need a fully functioning website that also appears spectacular. If people reach your site through your ads and don’t find it appealing, they won’t stay there for long. This will fail your geotargeting campaign.
If your business needs a website to welcome the audience your ads will bring, you can get one using Strikingly website builder. It offers over 200 free website templates you can customize and publish within a few minutes.
Strikingly provides numerous features to ensure your website’s user experience and interface are up to the mark. It allows you to add an online store to your website as a section. If you’re running your geotargeting campaign for locations worldwide, an online store can help you increase your sales by being of service to your customers any time of the day.
Moreover, in Strikingly’s Simple Store, you can accept payments from multiple methods and currencies to make purchasing easier for your customers worldwide. Strikingly enables you to accept 135 currencies.
Strikingly allows the US, Canadian, and Chinese sellers to display prices for different states. Here’s how you can do it:
1. Go to your site editor and tap “Store” in the top-left corner.
Image taken from Strikingly
2. Go to shipping and click “Add shipping option.”
Image taken from Strikingly
3. Select your region (amongst the US, Canada, or China).
4. You’ll see a list of states pop up. Select the ones you want to keep the same price for and save.
Image taken from Strikingly
Another way Strikingly contributes to making your geotargeting campaign more fruitful is via Strikingly analytics. You can check your store’s analytics to see your target audience’s response to your products or services. It will help you determine how well your campaign is performing.
In conclusion, location targeting is a great way to promote your business correctly. Getting this marketing technique right takes a lot of research and strategies. Once you’ve launched your campaign, keep an eye on the analytics and be patient because it takes time for businesses to thrive and start giving you what you deserve.
