This is a guest post by Jamie Fuller. Jamie is a digital marketing executive at AppInstitute. He spends his days building links, creating content, and drinking far too much coffee at one of the world’s leading DIY App Builders (over 70,000 apps built).
In the current day and age, the digital landscape is filled with competitors. Wherever you look they’ll be someone whom you consider to be your competition. Over the past few years, there has been a phenomenal shift towards utilising the mobile communications space within local marketing, for good reason. In the past, utilising the internet for anything was a hefty chore, but in the present? Well, everyone has a mobile phone!
Alongside this large change, the way we can target individuals has also changed. Data is a key player in the new world of marketing and advertising. This, in turn, has fueled the enthusiasm for local marketing.
Not only for local businesses
Most people would think that promoting a brick and mortar business is the only real use for local marketing. But, there is more to the story than meets the eye. Data-driven marketing is a relatively cutting edge principal and when you take a step back there are a number of benefits from the small coffee shop looking to create awareness, to the multi million pound turnover eCommerce store.
The opportunity in local marketing
With the mobile communications growing year on year, the data that fuels geo marketing is also out of control. It is without a doubt, hands down, one of the most untapped resources for marketers. Before the days of local marketing and mobiles, there wasn’t a need to worry because people took their local high streets to purchase products.
In the present day if you want to capture someone then their location plays a very big part in maximising the efficiency of marketing activities. With someone’s location, you can learn a lot about their intent and in turn target them.
Someone within a mile of your shop is much more likely to purchase your product, than if they were ten miles away, and at the same time someone within close vicinity searching for an American restaurant is more likely looking to drop in for a meal than to book online which can change the type of advert you show them.
Simple examples, but they do show how intent changes. The hidden benefit behind this is the remarkable ROAS that you can have from tailoring marketing around what is in essence, customer phycology.
Think outside the box
The second example of what we wanted to discuss was in regards to advertising. Businesses often drive revenue with a paid advertising campaign from the likes of Google. More often than not these campaigns are built and then refined on a national level unless of course, the business is a truly local business (restaurants, coffee shops, etc).
This national scale advertising model works well, but if you start to look at the overall bottom line and not the locational spend, it could result in wasted ad spend. Based on the geography of a country there are a number of factors that can be attributed to the results of advertising, whether that be the incorrect target audience or simply different shopping habits.
By measuring proactively the performance of campaigns on this level you can actively engage those locations with additional advertising or marketing to raise awareness to see if there is a difference in ROAS.
Historically, campaigns would be optimised with negative keywords and bid adjustments, however, there is much more that you could learn about your customers and their buying habits when looking at things on a local level. In the modern day and age, if you aren’t looking at micro segments of data it is impossible to make marginal gains on your ROAS. Always be thinking about your mobile budget, and keep local in mind and you’ll prevail in this crazy new world, because the bottom line is local marketing drives fantastic ROI.
