What is Local Content?

A 2021 Pew Research Center survey revealed a startling reality about today’s online environment: More than one-third of American adults report being online “almost constantly.”

People are actively scrolling social media feeds, staying updated on the latest news, shopping online, and watching engaging videos. In other words, they are consuming content, and there is a lot to take in.

It’s estimated that 7.5 million blogs are published every day, while 500 hours of YouTube content is uploaded every minute. This staggering sum underscores the reality that today’s internet users are drinking from a proverbial fire hose rather than enjoying an all-you-can-eat buffet. Meanwhile, Deloitte estimates that consumers are exposed to 400 – 10,000 advertisements each day.

Breaking through the noise can be incredibly difficult.

When decisions are made within milliseconds, one-size-fits-all content is no longer sufficient to engage site visitors. In other words, creating and distributing targeted local content can help companies break through the noise, reaching their audience with more meaningful, relevant content.

While the internet makes every company instantly global, local content rejects a one-size-fits-all content approach. In reality, there are no longer “national” or “international” consumers. They’re digital, and they’re local. Localization allows brands to leverage consumers’ unique desires and to identify those needs across very specific and pinpointed geographic areas.

Localization is the process of targeting a specific product, or advert for a product, at a particular geographic target market. Using IP intelligence and geolocation technologies can help companies with localization and internationalization, moving into new territories and finding ways to approach the consumers they want to attract.

Location data is a reliable tool for marketers who have learned to use it in their customer segmentation, analytics, attribution, and targeting. Today’s customers demand a personalized experience. As a Mckinsey & Company report on shifting customer trends notes, “Personalization can even be called a ‘hygiene factor’: customers take it for granted, but if a retailer gets it wrong, customers may depart for a competitor.”

The Benefits of a Localized Strategy

Location data is a reliable tool for marketers to use it in their customer segmentation, analytics, attribution, and targeting. The benefits are multifaceted and far-reaching, allowing businesses to:

enhance the shopping experience
simplify the customer experience
increase online revenues
drive offline revenue
Identify mobile users.

In other words, localized content can account for a customer’s cultural expectations, providing context and nuance to account for people’s lived experiences.

How to Develop an Effective Local Content Strategy

Locally targeted content has been proven to perform better than global content, facilitating six times more engagement. These benefits are made possible with geolocation and IP geolocation data.

Geolocation data can be deployed for highly strategic purposes. By combining precise geolocation data — down to the ZIP-plus-4 level, along with distinctions between home and business users, marketers can ensure a higher level of relevancy in their content localization strategy. Marketers have many ways to “go local,” including:

User-supplied Data

Sometimes you can just ask consumers for their location information. They can fill in a form to declare their whereabouts.

GPS

Every smartphone supports GPS. The technology can be accurate to within a few feet. That sounds great, but again, GPS data is only available when mobile users agree to share it. Most don’t because of privacy or battery-life concerns. GPS is also application-based (not browser based). Together, these two factors drastically limit how many users a brand can expect to target using GPS.

HTML5

HTML5-based mobile sites can collect some location information from visitors. However, visitors have to agree to this. Not to mention, their permissions expire after one session. As a result, HTML5 is very limited in terms of reaching an addressable audience.

IP Geolocation

IP geolocation technology uses an IP address to determine where a user is located. Everything connecting to the internet is assigned an IP address. There is no connectivity without one. As an example, even a smart refrigerator has its own IP address.

Going Local with Digital Element

By incorporating IP geolocation data into marketing initiatives, companies can improve the way they reach, acquire and retain customers.

Digital Element’s NetAcuity® IP Intelligence and geolocation data allows companies of any size to customize content, language, currency, products, promotions and more, thus encouraging visitors to spend more time actively engaged on a website — and increase the chance of moving a user from research to action.

NetAcuity® is a premium IP solution that, at its most granular level, can accurately and reliably locate an online user down to a city/postal code level and identify Wi-Fi connection locations without becoming personally identifiable. Accuracy is 99.99 percent at a country level, up to 97+ percent at a city level, and the data is refreshed 24×7 and delivered weekly. It is also easy to deploy on an internal server in less than 20 minutes. This is a tremendous advantage for businesses that want to quickly get out in front of the competition with a local strategy.