Geo Targeting Collect Locale Specific Data!
Organizations depend on targeted ads throughout the lifecycle of their marketing campaigns. The journey of targeted ads starts even before the product is launched with surveys and continues until the products have found their way to the customers.
Depending on the requirements of the marketers, the ads may have different strategies, but the general essence remains the same.
With the extensive data available on everyone on the internet, you can make all sorts of targeted customizations to your ads. One of which is geo-targeting. As you may, say, target customers of a certain age group, you also can target them based on their geo-location.
What Is Geo-Targeting
In easy words, geo-targeting is the practice of specifying the target locations of the ads. Marketers frequently use geo-targeting to engage local customers through advertising. However, many other ad-specific customizations can be added on top of geo-targeting to refine the ad performance.
In general, one or more radial areas are selected for the campaigns to run. Although you may specify the keywords for your product, geo-targeting works best for products and establishments that can be used by almost everyone.
Marketers use various radius targeting strategies to engage the customers. Of which, increasing keyword bids and setting different bids for different circles are pretty common.
Who Should Use Geo-Targeting
Geo-targeting isn’t for everyone. If you are a business that caters to the clients of a specific demographic (like food chain executives) or doesn’t operate through brick and mortar stores, geo-targeting may not be effective for you.
Let us present some businesses that may benefit from using geo-targeted ads.
Retail Marketers
Footfalls in retail businesses directly correlate with the number of GPS coordinates received from cell phones. Retail businesses with chains of more than 10-20 physical stores are found to be best fitted for geo-targeting, but stand-alone local businesses can also utilize the power of geo-targeting to increase audience engagement and sales.
Geo-targeting may also be utilized by retail businesses to lure customers that have visited a complementary location recently. The customers of a nearby clothes store may also want to visit your shoe store for a complete overhaul.
Direct to Consumer (DTC) Dealerships
When an average customer decides to buy a car, they go through different stores of different brands to physically test the cars themselves. As most customers can’t afford to buy a car every weekend, DTC companies like automobile dealerships use geo-targeting to engage with the customers that have been visiting their competitors’ stores.
Recently, I was approached by a KIA sales representative through a call while taking a test drive of a Honda. Although I went with the latter, KIA did manage to give me a ride the next day.
Car dealerships use geo-targeting to track the locations of the leads, and if need be, contact them to secure a sale. This approach works best for dealerships with limited physical stores as they don’t have the footfalls that major players enjoy.
In most cases, you, as a marketer, need to source locale-specific data to develop your geo-targeting campaigns.
How to Collect Locale-Specific Data for Geo-Targeting
Various methods are employed by marketers to harvest locale-specific data. Here are some examples of how you can do that.
Platform Specific Geo-Targeting
Typically, you don’t even need to collect locale-specific data to start your geotargeting campaign. Social media and search platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google offer geo-fencing as customization options on their ad portals.
Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest collect real-time GPS data from the users through their smartphones. These coordinates are used as a reference when you employ geo-targeting in your campaigns. Moreover, if you choose to engage in a specific place, they might send out the ads to the users who have that place registered on their profile.
A lot of customization options on top of geo-targeting are offered by these platforms. You can mix and match between the options to overlap the settings to optimize your campaign.
Web Scraping Locale Specific Data
Upon searching specific businesses on Google, you may find nearby establishments that are tangential to your query. For example, if you search for nearby restaurants, you’ll end up with a list of restaurants that are close to you and have the highest ratings.
From the hundreds of businesses and establishments, it may get challenging to harvest their names and phone numbers to target them with your sales campaign.
Web scraping is useful in these scenarios. Although the search engines discourage data scraping, you can effectively do that with the help of proxies. A proxy server works as an intermediary to forward your request through different servers with distinct IP addresses to hide you from the search engines.
Suppose you are looking for locale-specific data on law firms in Melbourne. All while sitting in your office in Texas. Whatever you do, you won’t be able to replicate the local search results from there. But by using Australian web proxies, you can make the algorithms believe that you are present there and can access the data without physically being present.
Using Existing Customer Data
If you already have a sustainable customer database from different locations, you can customize your geo-targeting campaign on the basis of that. This type of locale-specific data harvesting doesn’t work if you have a stand-alone store. Moreover, as a stand-alone store, you don’t even need to. You can customize your campaigns to fit all the customers without worrying about personalization.
Using existing data to develop geo-targeting campaigns works best for retail chains. They can understand which locations sympathize with which products and can design their campaigns around that.
Local Online Surveys
Online surveys are cheap and effective. You can reach thousands of potential leads by offering them a monetary benefit out of their inputs. You may ask for their contact details.
The offering may involve a lottery or anything else that you may deem fit. With a geo-targeted survey, you can harvest locale-specific data to reach them at a later date and increase your sales potential.
If you aren’t sure about where to start, geofence a location that you want to target and start a survey campaign about general things that are tangential to your service or product. Present challenging questions to understand who really has an interest in the niche.
Don’t present a long survey form for your audience. Keep it short or break them down throughout several pages.
The Bottom Line
Geo-targeting has presented a plethora of opportunities to local businesses. If done effectively, geotargeting can help you increase the footfalls to your store more than any other form of campaign. But to start with geo-targeting, you need locale-specific data. Sourcing locale-specific data is executed through platform-specific ads, web scraping, using existing data, and local surveys.
