5 ways businesses can use geo-targeting to boost sales

In a country obsessed with social media, “checking in” has taken on a new meaning. People check in to malls, restaurants, hotels, and what-have-you on Facebook. They tag locations on their vacation photos before posting them on Instagram. Sharing locations online has become crucial to Filipinos’ daily life.

This presents a perfect opportunity for entrepreneurs and marketers to increase sales by reaching out to on-the-go consumers who are near their business location. An effective marketing practice, mobile geo-targeting enables businesses to serve ads to people who are already physically near their location.

Why target your audience based on location? 

Location-based mobile marketing is effective because it’s targeted and personalized, treating consumers as individuals with unique wants and needs. 

Mobile marketers in the Philippines see the value of location-based mobile advertising in attracting and engaging customers. In a mobile marketing survey, 83.9% of marketers said targeting mobile users via geo-location had a huge business advantage.

If you’ve been struggling with dismal return-on-investment (ROI) on your ad spend, location-based mobile advertising could overturn things for your small business. Here are five mobile geo-targeting strategies you can use to your business’ advantage:

1) Mobile apps with geo-targeting capabilities

For businesses with multiple locations, mobile apps with integrated geolocation technology make it easy to offer promos or discounts through mobile ads targeted to consumers at every location.

Ford Philippines gained the benefits of mobile apps and geo-targeting through its Wildtrak Waze campaign. The automotive brand tapped Waze to deliver location-based ads within the traffic and navigation app to raise brand awareness of the Ford Ranger’s Wildtrak model.

Each time someone was driving near a Ford dealership, targeted ads would pop up on Waze’s route map. The ads came with call-to-action messages encouraging drivers to visit nearby Ford dealers and test drive the Wildtrak. So that drivers could easily find the nearest showroom, Ford-branded pins would also appear on the app, showing how to navigate to the dealership.

This geo-targeted mobile marketing campaign generated a 10% increase from the target sales, 10,110 clicks, 3.4 million impressions, and a 0.29% click-through rate, which was higher than the industry average. Ford Ranger also overtook the then-leading Toyota Hilux in the pick-up truck market.

2) Geofencing ads

Geofencing is a marketing strategy that defines an area around a shop or a place of interest where you can serve mobile ads with messages that acknowledge the user’s location.

Your business could benefit from geofencing as Pepsi did for its “Standfie” campaign. A thousand stores that sold the soda brand in the Philippines were geofenced and had standees featuring young celebrities Daniel Padilla and Julia Barretto.

Geo-targeted mobile ads were shown to consumers within the geofenced areas to urge them to take a selfie with the standee while holding a Pepsi product. The ads also contained a link going to a landing page that shows the nearest store from the user’s location.

Five days since the campaign launch, Pepsi got an 18% increase in engagement and a high click-through rate of 1.01%.

3) SMS geo-targeting 

Got a promo, event or announcement for your target customers? Combined with geo-fencing, sending ads through text is a good option for small business owners. It allows you to connect instantly with nearby consumers who are likely to visit your business and make a purchase. 

Take it from fashion e-retailer Zalora, whose mobile advertising campaign sent out text messages offering a discount voucher, directing mobile users to its online store, and urging them to share the voucher with friends. The campaign helped increase Zalora’s response rate by 150%.

4) Geo-conquesting

You can win customers away from your competitors using geo-targeted mobile ads shown to people who are current and past customers of a rival business. 

Using geo-conquesting, Quiznos’ mobile advertising campaign targeted people who had visited the American sandwich chain’s competitors such as Jimmy John’s and Subway near its branches. The geo-conquest paid off—it resulted in a 20% increase in coupon redemptions and 3.7 million new impressions.

5) Using location-specific keywords for paid search ads

The beauty of location-based mobile marketing isn’t just in physical geo-targeting. You can also target customers virtually by including geo-tagged keywords within your online content (e.g., blog posts, social media posts, website content, etc.).

This way, you reach out to people who make location-based search queries online such as “best hotels in Boracay” and “coffee shops in BGC.” When someone is searching for businesses around your location, yours may show up on top of the search results.

McDonald’s McDelivery Mobile campaign took a clever route for this strategy by “hijacking” its competitors’ keywords such as “KFC delivery” to show customers contextual ads for McDelivery.

Is mobile geo-targeting the right strategy for your business?

Localized mobile advertising could deliver better results than reaching out to a broad audience because your promotional efforts are targeted for people who are likely to buy from you. You don’t need to have a multimillion-peso advertising budget to implement one of these location-based marketing strategies. Even startups and professionals such as dentists and consultants can do so in smaller scales and budgets to build brand awareness, attract more customers, and drive sales.

It’s a digital marketing tool that has proven its effectiveness in several scenarios, and businesses today just might get a leg up if they took advantage of this technology. – Rappler.com