The Importance of Geotargeting in Marketing - Astute Communications

Geotargeting has opened many doors for advertisers. With mobile phone users constantly increasing, geotargeting has helped marketers reach these growing audiences. Geotargeting in marketing ensures you match your audience’s relevant content to improve conversions. Advertisers can create more relevant messaging by focusing on a specific market, leading to a better return on investment (ROI).

What Is Geotargeting?

Geotargeting allows marketers to specify what locations they want to advertise in. This advertising strategy reaches consumers using messaging appropriate to their locality and behavior. Marketers can also choose specific ad content based on where they’re advertising. Radius targeting is a more particular type of geotargeting where you can target consumers within a specific mile radius of your business. 

You can adjust your bid to make it higher when consumers enter within a certain radius of your location. You can also set up different radiuses depending on your company’s location if your business has more than one. Radius targeting is an excellent advertising strategy if you want to attract more customers to your storefront or if your company sells products that are often bought on the go. 

How Geotargeting Works

Marketers use geotargeting to deliver relevant messages to their audience at the right time. Geotargeting isn’t limited to just real-time location. It can also be based on historical location, targeting people who recently visited a specific region. It can also target people who live in particular regions and aren’t just passing through the area. 

Language, currency, offers, and visual elements will differ depending on your target location. Tailoring your ads to the culture you’re targeting is essential. Additionally, you can exclude specific areas, use location-specific keywords, run local awareness campaigns, and create custom target lists for your ads. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn support geotargeting so you can get the most out of your next marketing campaign. 

The Benefits of Geotargeting Marketing 

Geotargeted marketing should target the right area with the most relevant content at an opportune time to be successful. There are several advantages to geotargeting in marketing. 

You Can Hide Ads From Your Competitors

If you’re testing a new strategy or product, you don’t want your competitors to see your ads. Luckily, you can hide your ads with geotargeting and IP exclusion. IP exclusion hides your ads from your competitors’ corporate offices, while geotargeting lets you advertise in their backyard. You’ll first need to identify your competitors’ IP addresses. Then, you’ll enter the IP exclusions under advanced settings to exclude them from your AdWords campaign. 

You’ll Become Local and Relevant 

Small and large businesses can benefit from being local and relevant. Small businesses such as local stores and restaurants can always benefit from localized advertising by targeting people in their area. Big companies can also benefit from geotargeting by leveraging these queries with localized relevancy. Customers want to partner with someone they trust, and these companies can use ad extensions in geotargeting to identify themselves as a trusted source.

Best Practices

You should always target the areas your business serves, so you don’t waste your marketing budget and clicks on customers who won’t convert. Additionally, you should exclude the locations that your business doesn’t serve. This is the PPC equivalent of establishing negative keywords for SEO.

Marketers can also use Google Trends to see which regions are most likely to convert customers. Google Trends shows search volume for a specific keyword by country, region, subregion, and city. You can use this data to target your ads in the locations that will be most successful. Lastly, location and call extensions make it easier for local prospects to contact you by providing your street address and phone number. Make sure to specify that you only want to show your ads to those in that location, not those who search for your address. 

The Takeaway

Geotargeting is beneficial to most websites and advertisers. It allows you to match the most relevant content to users and experiment with conversion rate optimizations. There are many different advertising strategies that you can implement for geotargeting ads, but it’s essential to A/B test to find out what works best for your business and target customers. Additionally, taking advantage of monitoring tools allows you to browse your competitors and discover new ways to improve conversions and ROI.