The geographic location of visitors to your website or online business means everything. However, not many sites and brands are paying enough information to these stats, or even understanding why they are important and how to use such data to improve ROI and revenue.
With this in mind, the internet has drastically changed from the one-sided conversation that it used to be, and so have the many ways we can all advertise and attract new audiences online. Across the board, we continue to see social media being used more than ever before, and mobile devices are becoming the go-to source for internet access.
By understanding how to take advantage of #geographic location and #user targeting, you might just have an amazing opportunity to get a step ahead of the competition and cater to your audience’s needs like never before. Click To TweetLet’s now take a look at some of the best ways to accomplish this and how you can start implementing such methods into your content creation, branding, and marketing efforts today.
Using Location-Based Hashtags on Instagram and Twitter
Everyone is on social media. Social networks have completely changed the way businesses and brands interact with people around the world today. Thanks to the use of hashtags on popular social platforms like Instagram and Twitter, it’s now easier than ever to target audiences based on what’s currently happening in the world, events, and trends, or even through the country, state or city location-based hashtags.
Take a look at any of the most popular hashtags on Instagram, and you will quickly see how different brands and businesses are coming up with new and original content to relate with different audiences.
If you need help creating your own hashtags, you can always seek help from the top hashtag tools.
Whether it’s for fashion, health, and fitness, or even entertainment, millions of people will plug these hashtags in to target different audiences. However, when you start to move into geographic hashtags, you will often see the conversation and updates get a lot more personal. This is also why it’s so important for businesses big and small to take advantage of local hashtags. People within smaller markets are always looking up what’s happening in their cities and towns, and to not have your content appear within these search results would be a big mistake.
No matter what you are selling or offering as a service, make sure you put in the necessary time and effort to study what hashtags might work best for your brand, while also seeing which are being used by competition as well.
Prepopulate Site Visitor Location on Landing Pages
If you are doing any type of online advertising, you might be using landing pages or pre-sell sales pages to convert your audiences at a higher conversion rate. If so, you may also be taking advantage of geographic location settings on your landing page as well.
For example, if you were running an online dating offer or campaign for a popular dating site, it would convert at a much higher rate if you were to target individuals in a specific city or state, and then also have a landing page headline that says “# of Singles Living in Your City,” and have the “Your City” portion automatically changed to their city or state location based on the IP address of the person visiting your site.
You can see a real example of this in the screenshot below, or in this dating landing page case study and how they mostly all use geographic targeting to increase conversions.
Another way to set this up would be to create static landing pages that were created for each state, then changing these ads and targeting settings from right within the ad platform.
In short, just like how you can increase conversions by niching down to a specific need or niche audience, the same can be done when targeting geographic locations as well.
Create Content with Local SEO and Keywords in Mind
While most marketers and brands look at the internet as a one-stop-shop for traffic from all around the world, local businesses are often looking at the smaller picture. However, if you are a small local business that isn’t looking to ship outside of your state or only offer services in person, what’s the use?
If this is the scenario for your business, then you should definitely focus some time and effort on creating localized content for your site. Not only will this provide more value to audiences into your area looking to get work done, but it will also greatly help with your overall SEO as well.
A perfect example of this can be seen on the Christensen Recycling website in their footer area. Notice how they have their full address, a section for “Areas Served,” a local phone number, and hours of operation.
In short, this is pretty much anything a local auto repair shop or customer might want to know. Not only are they providing all of the necessary information for their audience, but they all also help towards ranking in Google for local keywords as well.
If you were to visit the site and click over to their Blog and Areas Served pages, you would also notice that they have a lot of location-specific articles as well. So if someone in a specific city or zip code was looking for information on a service they provide, their content would likely come up in the search results.
This concept is nothing too extraordinary, or out of the box, it’s just another method that works exceptionally well–but is often forgotten by many small local businesses and brands. There are also plenty of local SEO optimization tips that you can implement to start seeing improved results when using a WordPress powered site.
If you fall into this category, start searching around for your competition in Google with some local keywords, and see what they are ranking for. After that, start coming up with some content of your own and replicate the process.
Create Facebook Ads Campaigns Based on Location
Facebook isn’t just the most active and well-known social networking platform in the world today; it’s also one of the best for advertisers as well. With more than a billion active users, Facebook offers a self-serve advertising platform that allows businesses to target their audiences based on interests, demographic, and geographic location.
This type of advertising and targeting has completely changed the way small, and large businesses can run ad campaigns online while targeting an audience that they know are more likely to buy or visit from their location.
However, don’t confuse ‘geographic’ location targeting with just local businesses and advertising. This type of location-based advertising can be used for pretty much anything, especially when custom landing pages are used in the process as well.
Sticking with the concept of advertising through Facebook Ads, this is a dream come true for local retail businesses and restaurants. Not only does Facebook make it easy to create fan pages and gain followers, but it also makes it very easy to remarket and advertise to these audiences as well.
A perfect example of this would be if you were running a promotion this coming weekend, and you wanted to get some awareness for it, but you only want to target local customers. Sure, your fan page has 1,000s of fans, but how many of them actually live close by?
The great thing about running ads on Facebook and other social media platforms is that the engagement and delivery of ad impressions and results are instant. The same can’t be said for local SEO, as that can take a lot of time and money… and you never really know who is searching for what, and how they ended up on your site. However, it’s still something that you should be investing an equal amount of time and effort in.
But, if you are a local business and running a time-sensitive promotion and only working with a small budget, this type of marketing through social media is where you can really put your money to work.
Instead of running an ad campaign to all of your fans, just target ones within a small geographic location or a few miles outside of your business.
This will drastically help with conversions, while also delivering much higher results and engagement from locals that are probably already aware of your location.
Run Google Adwords Campaigns with Geographic Targeting
Just as important as social media is search traffic. And just like how Facebook delivers some amazing advertising options on their end, Google Ads does the same. With billions of searches taking place on Google daily, it’s important to make sure your business can be found at all times. This is especially true if you are a local business that relies on walk-in customers.
If you are new to running ads on Google, it’s pretty simple. All you need to do is set up a new ad campaign, select the keywords you want to rank for. For location-specific businesses, they also have some nice location targeting options as well.
Another benefit to getting familiar with Google Ads and their many small business features is setting up a ‘My Business’ account, which will allow you to claim, edit and update your listing in Google that appears when local audiences search for anything related to your business.
And once you have everything secure and in place with Google, you can then add a map widget to your site to make it easy for people to find your contact information, hours and address online easily.
Improve Conversions, ROI and Revenue with Location-Based Advertising
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to start using location-based advertising to reach new audiences, bring back existing customers, and also lower costs in the process.
Be sure to implement each of these methods into your online marketing efforts, and soon you will have more than enough traffic and leads than ever before.