Investing in a geotargeting platform should be a priority in every marketer’s checklist. The potential insight and utility it provides can be invaluable for many of your business operations. Marketing is one such area,and more specifically your marketing campaigns.
Marketing campaigns are the lifeblood of businesses and their brands. In an era known for cluttered news feeds and dwindling attention spans, effective marketing campaigns are essential for an organisation to earn their place in a consumer’s life. They need to cut through the clutter and speak to users personally, offering solutions to problems they might not even know they have. Crafting effective campaigns like this, however, can be quite the challenging endeavour; from consumer behaviour to platforms, there are a lot of facets to consider.
So, how does a geotargeting platform help with this?
Segmenting your audience via a geotargeting platform
The consumer base you’re targeting could be in their twenties, or they could be pushing forty. They might prefer mobile devices, or they may primarily stick to a desktop - maybe they’re on their desktop for most of the day but switch to mobile during the night. The basics of marketing offer a simple solution to dealing with all these variables - segmentation. Segmenting your audience into specified target groups can be immeasurably helpful in streamlining your marketing campaigns. This process is the very foundation of geotargeting.
Geotargeting works by accessing user IP addresses, through which they are able to discern user locations right up to the city-level. Most geotargeting platforms will maintain a database that collects and compiles this information for your reference.
Now that you know where your users are located in, the process of segmenting them becomes a lot easier. Different geographic areas have their own income levels, age and gender ratios, and all manners of other differential data. With this information in-hand, the initial stages of creating a marketing campaign become considerably easier.
Creating custom landing pages
Making connections with users is essential, after all, it’s the main reason why businesses formulate marketing campaigns. Personalising content is one of the most effective ways to go about this. It drives potential users into converting, as they get the sense that a business knows and understands them.
Creating custom landing pages for your marketing campaign is an excellent place to start with this. Whether it’s when they first arrive on your site, submit a lead-gen form or make a purchase, if the page they are directed to is personalised for them, it can make quite an impact. This can be as simple as the ‘thank you’ message that changes to the user’s local language and prices being shown in the local currency, all the way to full-blown design and UI changes. It doesn’t have to stop there either - if you’re planning to roll out pop-ins and display ads as part of your campaign, it’s always a good idea to make sure your design and copy are personalised.
Now you might be thinking, ‘great, I’ve created tons of content that’s personalised for different geographic areas, but how can I make sure that the right content reaches the right user?’ Well fear not, with a geotargeting platform, it’s a cinch.
Delivering personalised campaigns to the right audience
Once you’ve created your personalised content, it stands to reason that you want users to only see the content that’s been personalised for them. Let’s say you’re a business that operates in several Asian countries and you’ve developed content in several different languages and designs to fit each of them. You obviously don’t want someone from Singapore to see a content piece written in Hindi, right? A geotargeting platform can be a really effective tool in this regard, as they are able to redirect users to the content piece most relevant to them.
Likewise, you can block users from seeing your content as well. If you’re operating within only a couple of states in Australia, for example, there’s no point in someone from India seeing your offer, is there? This ensures the efficient utilisation of your campaign’s advertising budget, especially for PPC campaigns, as geotargeting negates irrelevant views and clicks significantly.
Stay hidden from your competitors
Blocking by way of a geotargeting platform can benefit your campaigns in another key way as well - it can keep your competitors from seeing it. Potential competitors from other cities, states or countries are more than likely eyeing your marketing campaigns. It’s even possible for them to lift an idea from your campaign and spin it into theirs.
Geotargeting platforms thereby offer you an option to keep your campaigns from getting unnecessary attention, and your competitors from being privy to your strategies.
Optimising your current and future campaigns
The location database that a geotargeting platform compiles is not only useful at the start of a campaign, but both during and after it as well. Through it, your business is able to gauge the location of the users that are interacting and engaging with your campaign, as well as those who aren’t. This allows businesses to optimise and be flexible with their campaigns on-the-go, further localising campaigns throughout their lifetime. And once the campaign ends, you have an even larger data pool to work with, helping ensure even better results for the next one.
In short, the development of effective marketing campaigns is by no means aneasy task. However, the more information and tools at your disposal, the easier it gets; a geotargeting platform is able to deliver on both fronts, providing invaluable information and insight into your consumer base, and the ability to effectively distribute your campaign content to them.
