Negosentro|Location-Based Marketing: How to Use Location to Your Advantage|Businesses all over the world are utilizing location-based marketing (LBM) to get their brands in front of the right audience at the right time. LBM is so beneficial for companies because it provides consumer data, which helps brands display relevant brand messaging to a highly-targeted audience. With technology becoming more advanced, businesses can use LBM to drive more foot traffic to their brick-and-mortar locations. Another great feature of LBM is that it not only helps companies with a physical presence, but it also adds a marketing boost for online businesses.
What Is Location-Based Marketing?
Businesses have always utilized location and proximity to attract customers. That’s why lots of brick-and-mortar businesses still send direct mail to potential customers. Even though digital marketing is a popular method of increasing brand exposure and driving sales, traditional marketing still plays a key role in helping businesses reach more customers due to its utilization of location.
LBM is a marketing and advertising technique that connects position, spaces and proximity to various points of purchase. Smartphones are great for delivering location data because they have GPS, cell tower positioning, WiFi access point tracking and other features that inform brands about where prospects are located and where they’re headed.
For example, geofencing marketing lets you send discount offers to consumers who enter a designated physical area near your competitors’ stores. This can help lure consumers away from competitors and attract them to your storefront. You can send these deals to consumers’ mobile devices and they can read them while on the go. If they find your offer appealing, they might drop in to your store and see what they can find. This is convenient for them because they were already in your area anyway. That’s what makes LBM so effective because you’re not encouraging consumers to go out of their way to visit your brick-and-mortar. This increases the chances of them paying you a visit.
How Can Your Business Use Location-Based Marketing?
There are various ways to implement LBM into your marketing campaign. Local search engine optimization (SEO) is one of them. This method is great for a number of reasons. For one, it allows companies to generate business without having to spend a dime. For example, targeting long-tail keywords that are location-specific can help drive highly-targeted leads to your company. Imagine you own a plumbing business and you’re based out of NYC. You can target the terms “NYC plumbing” or “plumbing in NYC” to generate traffic to your business.
You can also geo-target with pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. By delivering PPC ads to your potential customers, you can use more customizable targeting options like location-specific data and segmentation. This lets you filter your audience that has access to your PPC ads. As a result, you can target a specific group based on their location, which helps you avoid wasting clicks from people outside your targeted area. This works similarly to local SEO. One major difference between PPC ads and local SEO is that you have to pay for PPC ads, while local SEO is free. Also, it can take longer for your results to show up in the search engine results pages (SERPs) with local SEO. However, PPC ads can show up immediately after posting them as they don’t require your site to rank first.
Social media is another great way to implement LBM. You can use location tags on popular social media platforms to attract customers to your business. By tagging your posts, you can help major social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram better filter their user-generated content. This also increases the visibility of your posts and the probability of your posts gaining more organic impressions. Thus, if your company is located in NYC and you tag your posts with Brooklyn or Bronx, you can reach people in that area.
LBM is one of the most overlooked methods of marketing. Yet, it can be a powerful way to get your business out there to customers.
