8 Ways Geotargeting Helps Maximize Local Advertising ROI

Since last year, the pandemic has changed the face of the digital marketing world in so many ways one can ever admit. The changes brought about by the COVID-19 outbreak continue to push companies toward being more creative and having a deeper understanding of their customers. This means that enterprises using digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques had and will have to adapt the ever-changing methods to reach a wider audience more efficiently.

As travel restrictions were rolled out, companies needed to change their techniques to effectively target audiences not only demographically but also geographically. This is where geotargeting comes in handy.

Geotargeting: what is it?

From the term itself, geotargeting is marketing to a set of users based on their location. This kind of advertising will show your content to users that have opted for location-based services.

For example, if a customer opts to share their mobile phone’s GPS location with a food chain, they will get a selection of deals and offers exclusively from businesses within a 1- to 5-mile radius. With this kind of marketing technique, businesses are able to find qualified leads based on their city, zip code, or country.

Directing consumers to a store nearest them

What makes geotargeting quite important to your overall marketing strategy is that it can boost your in-store and online sales. Yes, online shopping is the preferred method of buying. However, there are consumers who want to try a product before they buy it, which is often the case when purchasing expensive products, such as jewellery, gadgets, furniture, and vehicles. Usually, consumers want to get a feel of the product before making the purchase.

In other words, using geotargeting helps encourage more customers to visit the stores nearest them. This is why you should include store details, operating hours, and even a map in your campaigns to help them find your location easily.

Similarly, when encouraging consumers to go to your brick-and-mortar store, you should make it a point to filter promotions based on the consumer’s location to ensure that they’ll be able to only see offers that are nearest them. Yes, this can be counterproductive to your goal of having a wider reach but it can also definitely help you reach customers who are already interested in what you have to offer.

A consumer’s location can also have a significant impact on their buying preferences. Geotargeting will help you provide a more personalized experience for your customers alongside your dynamic content that’s tailored to your product recommendations and sent via email and web.

Maximizing advertising ROI with geotargeting

The first time you create a campaign in Google Ads, it is set to the default setting, which includes all countries and regions. This is why you need to make sure that you get some form of geotargeting even it’s broad.

Take a look at some of the ways geotargeting can help bring up both your in-store and online sales.

COST-EFFECTIVE

Geotargeting helps you avoid wasting money on ad spending since you can select the areas or regions where you want to target your ads.

For example, you might want to target the whole of Singapore or a few select areas only. You can also target certain neighborhoods only, too. You can even exclude locations that are dominated by your competitors.

HIGHLY PERSONALIZED EXPERIENCES

One of the most important benefits of geotargeting is that it can help your business provide customers with super-personalized experiences. Your offering can be related to local events or you can use a language that your local community can relate to.

For example, you can run a special promotion for your restaurant or retail store if there’s an upcoming festival or major event in your local area.

SEGMENTED AUDIENCES

With geotargeting, you can target the right people at the right time and in the right location. This saves you a lot of time and effort in creating ads that don’t make sense to those who cannot relate to them. By segmenting your audience, you’ll be able to save a lot of money on ads that don’t actually work for some people.

TEST OUT NEW MARKETS

If you want to test the waters in a new area, you can run lower-budget campaigns first. If it ends up doing well, you can run more lower-funnel ads. This is one of the major advantages of geotargeting. So, if you’re curious about how your ads will perform in new areas, it’s best to split up your campaigns according to geographics to save money.

DRIVES DOWN KEYWORD COSTS

Google AdWords uses a supply and demand algorithm for its bid system. This means that terms with higher demands cost more, while lower-demand words cost less. So, if you bid on the keywords “legal advice,” then you’ll most likely be competing with every other lawyer in the entire country. But if you bid on “lawyer Jurong,” for example, then you have significantly less competition, allowing you to maximize your investments without overspending on keyword bidding.

BOOSTS LOCAL SEO

Nowadays, users expect search engines to return local results tailored to their search queries and bring up geo-targeted results. Google reported that a third of all recent mobile searches are for local establishments. However, Google also found that fewer people are using their zip codes to search for local businesses, which means that they expect search engines to automatically return results that are local to them. This also means that you need to create landing pages that target the location you are marketing to boost local SEO efforts.

CREATES EFFECTIVE ADS THAT INCREASE CLICKS

Geotargeting can also help you create more relevant ads that actually convert customers. For example, if you’re a dentist and have clinics in Paya Lebar and Geylang, which are approximately 38 minutes apart, it’s unlikely for people to drive that far just to get prophylaxis. But if you create two different ads for two different geo-targeted campaigns, you can appeal to customers from two separate locations. This ups the chance that your audience will pay attention because they can choose the location that’s closer to them.

DRIVES QUALIFIED TRAFFIC TO YOUR SITE

By using geo-targeted ads to market to different people in different locations, you will have better traffic coming to your website, which also translates to higher ROI. This is because qualified traffic means more leads and thus, higher conversions – increasing your return on investment.

Additionally, better quality traffic reduces bounce rate and improves your overall performance metrics, proving that your website provides value to your customers’ lives.

Bottom line

To be able to incorporate geotargeting into your digital marketing strategy, you need to first understand how it can help fuel your sales, whether online or in-store. Once you are able to delve deeper into its many amazing advantages, you’ll be able to formulate a stronger, more concrete marketing campaign using geotargeting.