What is Geotargeting?
“Geotargeting is the process of providing unique content and/or services to website visitors based on their geographical location.
It is used in Internet marketing techniques to identify, prioritize and target users in accordance with their physical location.”
I literally couldn’t have said it better myself, which is why I left that bit to Techopedia.
Why use Geotargeting?
It might all seem a bit Black Mirror, but along with accurately calculated shipping costs, travel distances to be estimated and even for accurate weather readings in a person’s location, geographical targeting also opens the door for alerting people to your business or product who are nearby or in a relevant area for you.
Example:
Say you’re a sandwich shop and you’ve got a lunch deal running, you could target devices within a two-mile radius of your shop between 12 pm and 2:30 pm to get yourself in with a chance of being their lunchtime pick of the day!
Bricks and mortar shopping experiences are starting to evolve and intertwine the ways they operate with online shopping behaviours. This offers a more personalised and relevant shopping experience to the online user. Geotargeting can help you edge closer to the increasingly mobile shopper and if you’re a business that relies solely on footfall (pun intended), proximity or online deliveries it’s an absolute no-brainer.
Ways to Geotarget
There are a couple of different ways in which you, as a marketer, can use geographical targeting;
Radius of location
This should be used if you have a physical business and want the footfall of the people who are actually in the area, or if you offer delivery within a certain radius of town. This is also called Proximity Targeting.
Countries
You can target your ads to entire countries (that are relevant to your business) as long as you’re tailoring your messaging and advertising to show that you offer worldwide shipping.
Areas within countries
You can even target specific locations, such as tourist attractions, cities, towns, shopping centres and even airports (think holiday books, duty-free offers… the list goes on!).
Mentions within locations
With the clever use of social media, you can get really granular with targeting people who mention something you have to offer within a certain location.
Take Twitter of example, if someone were to tweet saying:
“Send immediate help, in desperate need of cake this afternoon #literallydying”
Costa could bid on the “cake” keyword and run a promoted tweet for that specific user offering them a discount to the nearest Costa café. Clever, huh?!
Excluding areas
Call it reverse geotargeting if you will! If you know there’s a certain area or location you really don’t want to see your campaign, you can save yourself some pennies and prevent your ad from appearing in this location by excluding it completely.
Geofencing
Geofencing is essentially drawing a virtual fence around a certain area you want to target. It acts as a virtual barrier, that when crossed by a person and their enabled mobile device, will trigger a notification to alert them to your deal and give them an incentive to swing by your shop.
Personalising your Geotargeting
Personalising communications with the right customers at the right time builds a deeper sense of trust and ultimately, closes more sales. By getting super personalised in your content creation, the customer is more likely to engage with your message and ultimately, with you as a business.
For example, if you’re a clothes retailer who ships worldwide, make sure you’re using your geotargeting to reflect the appropriate seasons for your visitors from different parts of the world, if you were advertising winter coats to the UK in British summertime, your bounce rate and sales conversions would likely bomb for this part of the world!
If relevant, try to include the name of your target location in your campaign. If the copy matches the user’s search query, the relevant text will appear in bold, helping your ad stand out on the page!
To summarise, Geotargeting and personalisation are coming on leaps and bounds when it comes to accuracy and achieving positive results for businesses so if it’s not something that’s already integrated into your marketing plans, it really should be.
Getting your business or product in front of a highly relevant and targeted audience has never been easier and intertwining your digital and in-store shoppers is the next step forward.
If you’d like to speak to one of our paid advertising specialists about getting your business seen online, get in touch below!