With geo-targeting, brands, businesses, and marketers have a significant advantage over their counterparts from the past. The ability to pinpoint a specific location of your intended audience in real-time gives you a decisive competitive advantage.
Because of its ability to deliver relevant ads to specific buyers, this location-based targeting has revolutionized marketing campaigns and strategies.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll review everything you need to know about geo-targeting marketing. By the end, you’ll better understand geo-targeting and its benefits. You’ll also know how to use geo-targeting to make your marketing efforts more effective and to help you get ahead of your competition.
Understanding geo-targeting
Geo-targeting is a modern and strategic approach to digital marketing which involves putting your ad directly in front of a potential customer based on their physical location.
In your geo-targeting campaign, you can reach your audience based on many location factors, such as behavior and location groups near a storefront, small business, or shopping center.
This powerful way of marketing helps you improve engagement and provide a significant experience that is relevant and drives better results.
How geo-targeting works in digital advertising
Geo-targeting uses location-based data to deliver ads to your intended audience, combining the physical and digital realms. This predominantly works in two ways:
- Audience targeting: As the name suggests, audience targeting focuses on selecting a target audience for your marketing campaign. You engage all relevant ad platforms and base your audience on psychographic, behavioral, and demographic factors.
This is a solid way to captivate your intended audience at different locations as you focus on their specific interests and make calculated choices from referenced data. You can also refine your audience targeting further by incorporating a user’s location.
- Location targeting: Location targeting focuses on creating an advertising platform based on a user’s location and foot traffic. A popular method is geofencing, which uses GPS data to create boundaries and send Google ads, Facebook ads, and even push notifications to your audience’s mobile phone.
You can get as specific or broad as possible by selecting the region, neighborhood, or city where you’d like to deliver your ads.
When combined with the power of audience targeting, geo-targeting is a highly effective way of putting your practical solution in front of the right audience at the right time and place.
How to set up geo-targeting advertising
Now that we’ve explored the fundamental aspects of geo-targeting, you may be wondering how exactly you can harness the power of this robust solution.
Below, we’ve outlined some of the most practical ways to incorporate geo-targeting into your next location-based marketing campaign.
1. Choose the right platform
The platform you choose is perhaps the most critical step in geo-targeting. While the effects may be straightforward, the end-to-end process contains many moving parts that can be difficult to tie together.
You want a platform that has dynamic capabilities that align with your brand and goals. Optimizing location data, targeting local prospects, and launching meaningful (and timely) ad campaigns must work in concert for your marketing strategy to be successful.
At Digital Element, we deliver on our promise to provide excellence to our clients and partners. Our robust platform is a trusted provider of geolocation solutions which help to unlock the full potential of your team and brand.
Learn how we use our world-leading IP address geolocation data to produce localized content, enhance your analytics and create a robust, targeted ad strategy.
2. Set up your target parameters
Once you have the right system and tools, start working on your next campaign. Setting up suitable parameters has everything to do with what action you want your target audience to take.
Your radius targeting strategy should be in a determined place, such as a specific area, specific countries, or even specific business locations.
Remember to narrow your focus to ensure your ads reach the right audience. Sometimes it may be tempting to increase your boundaries to a broader circumference, but this may not necessarily help your efforts.
A great way to do this is to set up areas around brick-and-mortar stores, as your ideal buyer will already be in a purchasing mindset.
For example, if you’d like to set up a discount campaign on bicycles, targeting bike repair shops, equipment stores, and the surrounding area may be more beneficial than an entire region.
3. Create your ads
This is where creative liberty kicks in. Establishing the right platform and setting up your boundaries is the groundwork. Now it’s time to start building.
Always begin by analyzing what data you have in front of you, especially the one leveraged through your comprehensive platform solution.
No one wants to feel like they’ve been “sold.” Keep the user experience high throughout the journey by putting yourself in the customer’s shoes.
Craft a compelling ad that will resonate with your target users. A specific pain point and a sense of urgency will get you the right customers.
In collaboration with the specific area you have outlined in the previous step, your user will receive these notifications in a way that is meaningful to them and will feel compelled to take action.
4. Track and monitor your results
Success isn’t just luck. As a marketer or business, you know that consistency is vital when creating a new campaign. By leveraging the right platform, setting up the correct parameters, and crafting an enticing ad, you can get the data necessary to make further choices.
Track your key metrics that make sense to the specific campaign you have launched. Your PPC and search engine ads can deliver valuable feedback such as impressions, clicks, and those who have taken action.
Wherever possible, use a data-driven approach to evaluate your engagement rates and where you can improve them. Sit down with your team to make a plan of action to regularly review ad performance campaigns and determine what changes you can make, if any.
Geo-targeting methods for reaching target audiences
At this stage, you have all the preliminary knowledge to launch and evaluate your first geo-targeting campaign or improve upon an existing one.
As you explore the decisive difference between geo-targeting campaigns, you’ll want to dive further into the intricacies of your targeting options to reach your desired audience effectively.
IP targeting
Your target consumer will have a unique IP address associated with their internet connection. Anyone on a Wi-Fi network at this IP address can see your ad or campaign.
This type of targeting is beneficial in places where you know your users will frequently assemble so that you can inspire and compel them to action with a quick turnaround.
Malls are a great example of IP targeting, where everyone connects to the same network. Present a deal on baked goods around lunchtime at a mall on Saturday, and you may see some great results.
GPS targeting
GPS will always be a primary factor when considering your options, especially if you aren’t sure of the specifics of your user’s behavior — or if you’re trying to cover a larger area.
Targeting a geographic location may not necessarily present your ad to a single audience, so it may not be the best strategy in all situations.
For example, targeting a city may not make sense for a specific product or service. On the other hand, it’s a great way to get people excited about an upcoming event, festival, or local fundraiser.
Geo-fencing
Geo-fencing describes setting up a virtual boundary in the physical world in real-time. Once a user steps within the pre-determined boundary, it triggers your ad delivery.
Geo-fencing helps deliver powerful messaging to consumers that crave both trust and solutions in the messaging they see. This strategy enables you to set up different “clusters of similarity” through radius targeting to engage the right audience in your campaign.
Geo-fencing can ensure you run time-sensitive ads that bridge the connection between the real and digital worlds. It can also help improve your GPS targeting and help you better design campaigns catered to the device your audience will be viewing it on.
Location-based mobile advertising
You can combine various techniques into a location-based mobile ad campaign, including GPS targeting, geofencing, and IP targeting. Many of your consumers will likely have their smartphones on them at all times, which always helps you to deliver your contextually relevant ads.
This approach effectively drives foot traffic to brick-and-mortar stores, local events, and even limited-time offers.
Social media targeting
Geo-targeting takes a new twist on an old method. Social media marketing has been around for a long time by marketing standards. Of course, the global audience network connects on many different social media platforms where they can engage, interact, and share with others.
Social media targeting involves both organic and PPC campaigns. With geo-targeting, Facebook ads, Google ads, Snapchat posts, LinkedIn ads, and similar strategies are much more effective.
While social media targeting is primarily behavior and audience specific, you can combine this with your audience’s location to deliver timely, relevant, contextual ad campaigns.
This method is helpful for more specific and defined audiences. For example, targeting pet owners in a specific city who enjoy the outdoors and inviting them to local events like summer hiking with their furry friends.
Cross-device geo-targeting
Geo-targeting doesn’t just stop at choosing specific (or broad) locations, but the display. You’ve spent weeks creating the perfect campaign and selecting the proper parameters and creatives — but it won’t be effective if no one sees it.
There are many situations where a customer may not have a phone with an internet connection or push notification to see your ads. For example, airlines install tablets in some of their planes, and business conferences provide laptops, desktops, and other displays.
Choosing different platforms and devices to deliver your message makes sense if you want to target similar audiences.
Benefits of geo-targeting advertising
Learning more about the technology behind geo-targeting and its applications in marketing is vital to understand the holistic benefits of employing it in your strategy.
Once you have tested different parameters, methods, and delivery channels, you can refine your data-driven approach to reach your intended audience.
Here are some remarkable benefits you can enjoy when harnessing the power of location-based advertising:
- Increase click-through rates.
- Increase conversions.
- Reduce costs.
- Benefit SEO efforts.
- Coordinate e-commerce and brick-and-mortar campaigns.
- Improve ROI.
- Reach a wider audience.
- Target your ads to specific demographics.
- Target your ads to specific interests.
- Create compelling and engaging ads.
- Collect more meaningful insights into your audience.
Geo-targeting simplified with Digital Element
Geo-targeting is becoming increasingly vital to aiding digital advertising efforts. No doubt geo-targeting can complement and improve your current advertising strategy.
This guide walked you through the importance of setting up targeting parameters, creating great ads, tracking your results, and choosing the right platform to tie it all together. With the different geo-targeting methods at your disposal, you can create a hyper-focused campaign that drives results.
Digital Element is a leader in geolocation technology that empowers businesses with solutions through reliable and precise data.
Unlock your brand’s potential and find out more about our IP geolocation today.