Hyperlocal Targeting: Does it fit Your Needs?
One of first things that businesses consider when either starting or growing operations is location. You must be located so as to be accessible to customers. These days the internet is a location itself, allowing businesses to reach as far as the virtual world itself, but brick and mortar is by no means dead. If you are marketing brick and mortar, on the internet, the idea of hyperlocal marketing is taking hold as a mainstay.
Hyperlocal marketing basically means that you advertise to people who live work or at the very least commute by your physical location. This makes sense but new techniques are making it more possible to reach customers and pointing out the effectiveness of appealing to people based on getting them what they need close to home.
Traditionally, and still today, there has been multiple mail out campaigns that you can be a part of in order to send marketing collateral directly to houses in targeted areas. Being that we live in a digital age it may be more effective to move these mail out campaigns to the internet. After all, most people take to the internet to find what they need far before they head to their mail box. The internet allows you to be specifically searched for and found, as long as you have placed yourself correctly. In this instance SEO is not the topic. There are hundreds of coupon websites that you can be a part of. While this post isn’t being written to support any single one, it is being written to recommend the concept. Yes your clients might be weary of people who only want to buy when there is a deal, but regardless well put together coupon promotions can stimulate sales while increasing brand awareness. From a hyperlocal standpoint many sites allow you to choose which zip codes you will distribute in so that you aren’t wasting time promoting to customers who live too far away.
Google has gone (even more) hyperlocal as well. They have recvently added a feature to their Adwords campaigns. If users choose to share their physical location with Google (keep in mind that the location can be a PC, Lap Top or Cell Phone) then AdWords can now tell searchers how far they are from a particular store. They even provide a map to help them get to you. To make things easier there is now a way that people can click on the phone number in the AdWord listing and Google will connect their cell phone to your location. You still pay per click when users use the ad to visit your website, now you will “pay per call” when they choose to call you. While this is obviously another revenue stream for Google, it is one that might be very helpful to you. After all, a customer that wants to talk to someone at the business location is arguably more likely to become a paying customer than someone who peruses your website. With this development Google is doing everything that they can to lead a horse to water. You need to be there to show them how to drink.
Consumers love easy. Anything that can be done to make anything easier, including shopping, will pay off. It’s clear that limited traveling distances makes shopping esier so why not got hyperlocal yourself?
Sources:
American Marketing Association Tampa Bay
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