Among the many questions we get about digital advertising, one of the most common is how our clients can best make use of hyperlocal marketing. We get that question about as frequently as we’re asked about tips for mobile marketing, which are just as familiar as queries about implementing a geo-fencing campaign.
I wrote this for you, dear reader, but I also wrote it for those of us at Raka. Why? Because to us, those questions are all the same thing. So before we go further, let’s clarify something: As a digital advertising tactic, geo-fencing is the same thing as hyperlocal marketing is the same thing as mobile marketing. Keep that principle in mind throughout this article.
Let’s back up for a moment and note just what hyperlocal marketing is. Hyperlocal is essentially advertising and marketing efforts geared toward a specifically defined geographic area, i.e. a borough, a handful of city blocks, or even a single neighborhood. This targeting allows businesses to reach out to local customers in a very specific, very targeted way not possible through broader advertising efforts.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s clear up a couple misconceptions about mobile/hyperlocal marketing.
Mobile marketing is a self-managed service
We started with a difficult one because this is both true and untrue. Mobile marketing can tactically be managed via the Google Display Network, Bing Content Network, Facebook Ads Manager, or your display network of choice through a combination of location targeting and bid adjustment management, but only to a certain degree. If any of this seems unfamiliar to you, be sure to read our article “8 Questions to Ask Before Starting Digital Advertising.”
The limitations of this approach include, but may not be limited to:
- Ads can only be a certain file size
- They may not offer inventory that supports custom creatives
- They often can only target a radius around a particular city
- The available inventory may be limited
This last one is a big one. Per TechCrunch, apps occupied 92 percent of users’ time on their mobile devices as of early 2017.
The moral of the story? While mobile users can be targeted in lots of ways, the best mobile marketing campaigns are managed programmatically with the goals of either driving awareness, increasing in-store traffic or both. Programmatic advertising allows for powerful systems to make split-second decisions for you and serve ads based on user behavior and preferences taking a lot of the manual labor and guesswork out of advertising for your business.
Geo-fencing and geo-filters are the same
Any Centennial will tell you this isn’t true. Geo-fencing is as described above, geo-filters are an enhancement that users can use to make Snapchat creatives a little bit more customized. Filters on Snap can be created for free, and can also be published for free (in the case of Community Filters) or at a nominal cost (Filters/Lenses).
Misconceptions out of the way, let’s discuss four ways in which mobile marketing could help your brand.
1. Targeting users near a store
This is the obvious one. If a potential customer is within a mile (or two or five or two-point-five) of your storefront, and you feel that they’d be interested in your product or service, there are a lot of benefits to targeting them.
Those benefits may include:
- Getting them to call your store via an interactive ad that populates a call menu
- Driving them to the store via an interactive ad that populates a map
- Creating awareness of your soon-to-open store via an interactive ad that populates a video explainer
- Creating awareness of your brand using an eye-catching ad
2. Targeting competitor locations
We’ve seen clients in the big-box retail space have a lot of success with this approach. By targeting users who recently visited a competitor who didn’t have the product they wanted or the financing they needed, we can drive more lower-funnel foot traffic to stores (or at least curious shoppers to our clients’ sites).
3. Targeting users near a conference or event
Unless the event or conference is CES or the reveal of the latest iPhone, this tactic is typically best-suited for B2B companies or service providers, and allows brands to reach users who may be at an event, traveling to that event (i.e. at the airport or bus terminal) or at a location affiliated with the event (a bar where a social event is hosted, for example).
4. Targeting users who are traveling
Are we at Raka the only ones who always want to spell “traveling” with an extra L?
For users who take the programmatic approach to mobile marketing, and who commit to stellar creative, this tactic is actually one of the most powerful of the bunch. The reason is simple: People who are traveling have oodles of time to just sit around and be entertained. That’s where the stellar creative part comes in.
If your ad is compelling enough to earn a click from these users who are waiting to be entertained, and the creative (i.e. copy and visuals) is engaging enough to give them a reason to stick around, this tactic helps to increase not only the value of impressions but the length of time that the brand message has to resonate with users.
If you’re in need of a mobile marketing campaign that can increase your brand’s reach and best-in-class messaging & assets that can extend your relationship with your audience, we’ve got you covered. Contact Raka today and we’ll get you started on the road to an unbeatable digital advertising campaign!
