When you look around the internet, you will find all these adverts always staring at your face. But have you noticed something when looking at these, sometimes not so pleasing to look at “adverts”? These are exclusively devoted to promoting online businesses. You would rarely find an online advertisement for your local coffee shop or the local Chinese joint.
The prevalence of advertisements for online businesses has given people an illusion that modern marketing strategies, at least those that revolve around using the internet, are only suitable for online businesses. However, This is not entirely true; you can easily use the marketing strategies specific to brick-and-mortar businesses to boost your sales.
The most effective marketing strategy that can help boost your offline business is hyperlocal marketing.
Hyperlocal Marketing
What is hyperlocal marketing, you might ask? Well, as the name implies, it is a Marketing Strategy that aims to reach consumers in your vicinity. This strategy helps you target those people who are motivated and willing to buy your products.
The end goal of hyperlocal marketing is to increase foot traffic in your store, and you can achieve it by strategically showing the right ad at the right time to the right person.
You can also use this strategy to raise awareness about your brand in your locality. With all the other marketing factors, the business’s location plays a significant part in preparing this marketing strategy. That is why marketers call it hyperlocal marketing.
What Are The Advantages Of Hyperlocal Marketing?
While hyperlocal marketing is essentially a component of the marketing mix that heavily favors offline businesses, online ventures are also implementing it to reap the tremendous results it provides. This marketing strategy has various advantages over other methods for both offline and online businesses.
The following are some of the significant advantages of hyperlocal marketing:
Hot Hyperlocal Leads
It is a very niche marketing strategy, which lends it the advantage of bringing in leads who are ready to buy your product. We can attribute the higher conversion rate to the fact that most people targeted via ads utilizing this technique are already looking for the things you offer.
For instance, if a person is looking for a restaurant nearby, they will typically search for restaurants near me, and if you are in the vicinity, your business will pop up in the search results.
You can leverage the location-based searching mechanism that most giant players use to serve better results to their users. Whether it is social media or a search engine, when people use terms like “near me” or “nearby,” your business will come up if you have used the proper technique.
Using hyperlocal ad campaigns marketing will also ensure that your ads will show up in people’s social media timelines when they are in your locality, so you have a greater chance of getting their business.
You can use various tools to send out push notifications to the people in your general vicinity, alerting them if you provide any special offers.
Less Budgetary Requirements
Because you don’t have to reach as many people, you don’t have to pay as much. Running a Local PPC Ad Campaign is much cheaper than operating a nationwide ad campaign.
By using hyperlocal marketing, you not only save on your advertising budget, but your return on ad spending (ROAS) also increases. The reason for that is that you are targeting a super-specific audience, which decreases the cost per target and increases the ROAS.
Easy To Set Up And Operate
The limited scope of hyperlocal marketing makes it easier to set up and manage than a more expanded ad campaign. Under this method, it is easier to create personalized ads because you target fewer people than you would in a more spread-out ad campaign. Personalized ads result in higher conversion rates.
Easy To Measure Performance
Because the number of targeted people is smaller, it is easier to track the conversion and asses from where you are getting the foot traffic.
Strengthen Relationships With Customers
The most significant contributor to a business’s growth is the relationships you build with your customers.
If you correctly implement the hyperactive marketing strategy, people in your local area will know that they can rely on you when they require a product or service you provide. When a person starts trusting a business, they become a returning customer. Better yet, your loyal customers can act as brand ambassadors for your business.
Works In Real-Time
Another significant advantage is that hyperlocal marketing works in real-time. With this technique, you can increase conversion rates in real-time because it offers deals on products or services for which the potential customers are actively looking.
With all these apparent advantages, you can’t ignore the might of hyperlocal marketing.
How Do Hyperlocal Ad Campaigns Work?
With a little device in every pocket – the smartphone, marketers can get to know their potential customers’ exact location. It is possible due to the following:
- IP addresses
- GPS
- Wi-Fi
- Bluetooth signals
Almost every modern smartphone has GPS, making it easier for the smartphone user to navigate and providing a tool for marketers to get the exact location often to pinpoint accuracy.
Knowing a person’s location is vital in operating a hyperlocal ad campaign because it allows the business to narrow down its audience to a specific area. All the major PPC platforms, including Google and Facebook, provide the option to target a particular area, making it easier to implement hyperlocal ad campaigns.
After settling for an area, you can work on setting triggers that will show your ads.
The following can be excellent triggers that can show your ads to the targeted audience once they are in your target locality:
- Search queries
- Search History
- Behavioral patterns
You can set up a hyperlocal ad campaign that displays ads in the form of text messages, app notifications, search engine result pages (SERPs ads), email alerts, or a combination of all. People will receive these ads on their mobile devices when they enter your targeted area and perform an action set as a trigger.
What Should You Get Right Before Launching A Hyperlocal Ad Campaign?
By reading this far, you know what hyperlocal marketing is and why it is so essential in the modern world of smartphones and smart gadgets where online businesses are rapidly consuming offline brick-and-mortar stores.
The following are the hyperlocal ad campaign fundamentals that you must get right before implementing the ad campaign that drives results.
Optimize Your Google My Business Page
Google My Business (GMB) is a free tool provided by Google that lets businesses manage their online presence on Google search result pages. It is beneficial for brick-and-mortar stores with little to no online presence because it can help Google users find businesses nearby.
When optimizing your GMB listing, try paying close attention to three main criteria that Google uses when serving users with GMB listings.
These essential criteria are:
Relevance
Google only considers a business to be relevant if it matches a searcher’s query.
You can take the following steps to optimize for relevance:
- Set your workdays and operating hours
- Select the correct category to describe your business
- Write a detailed keyword-focused business description
Prominence
This factor helps Google determine whether your business is reliable enough to recommend to users.
Try using the following tips to optimize for prominence:
- Manage your online reputation
- Use high-quality images
- Get high-quality reviews
Proximity
It helps determine if your business is close enough to recommend to the user.
Though it is not possible to influence a searcher’s proximity to your business location, you can follow some best practices to improve your chances of getting listed in the search results.
Try creating a separate landing page for each location if you operate your business in more than one area. You can also leverage famous nearby landmarks. Try including these landmarks in the business description. It will help your business to show up when the user uses that landmark as a reference in their searches.
After optimizing your GMB listing, it is time to move on to other essential elements, which you must get right if you want your hyperlocal ad campaigns to provide a healthy ROAS.
Make Sure Local Mobile And Search Optimization Is On Point
Local SEO is a significant part of determining the effectiveness of your hyperlocal ad campaigns. Google’s research portrays that “near me” searches on mobile devices increased by more than 500% in the last few years.
The following is what you can do to optimize local SEO:
- Include contact information on your website
- Optimize for voice search
- Focus on long-tail keywords
- Create location-specific metadata
- Feature your location in a few of your URLs
- Write hyperlocal content using location-specific keywords
In addition to optimizing for local SEO, you should also ensure that your website is mobile-friendly.
It is easy to understand that when people are searching with the term, they are not sitting at their desks; they are most probably using a smartphone or, in some cases, their tablet.
Your website’s UI (user interface) and UX (user experience) are crucial. If your website is well-optimized for mobile, then the person searching will open your website and get the relevant information before arriving at your store. However, a bad UX will most certainly dissuade them from visiting your place no matter what quality of a product you are selling.
A well-optimized mobile-friendly website can help drive your offline conversions.
If your website ranks higher for local search queries, it will be easier for you to win at hyperlocal marketing. So, try investing time and effort to get your site ranked for local search terms, and make sure that your website has an excellent user experience (UI), as it is the first thing that your potential customers will see.
What To Know Before Creating A Hyperlocal Ad Campaign To Drive Results?
Are you feeling pumped to create a hyperlocal ad campaign?
Let’s go through some of the tips and tricks that will help you reach your marketing aspirations.
User The Correct Keyword For Hyperlocal Ad Campaigns
Keywords are essential pieces in any online advertising campaign. The PPC ad campaign’s success hinges on the success of the keyword.
To ensure your hyperlocal ad campaign’s success, you have to focus on location-based keywords, and for that, you can use tools like Ubersuggest.
However, finding the right keyword is only half the battle. It is also essential to look at the negative keywords to minimize the click wastage that can drive up your PPC campaign cost.
Negative keywords are those keywords against which you don’t want your ad to appear, as they don’t serve any purpose in helping you reach your objective.
Resonate With Local Culture
When writing the ad copy for the hyperlocal ads, take inspiration from the local culture. Meaning, try to leverage local stereotypes and incorporate local phrases if possible. It will add a sense of personalization to your ad campaigns, resulting in your prospective customers feeling safe following your ad to your location.
Connecting with the local culture will also make your brand more acceptable among locals and increase brand loyalty.
Learn From Your Competitors
Your competitors can be your most significant and most unlikely source of help when setting up your hyperlocal ad campaign.
The first thing that pops into my mind after reading this sentence is, “How can they help me?”
It is easy, to run ad campaigns in the vicinity of your competitor’s locations. While stealing customers from your competitors sounds enticing. However, you need to prove that your offering is better than what your competitor is selling to pull this off. You can achieve this by effectively pitching your UVP or unique value proposition or offering discounts or other incentives.
One of the excellent examples of this strategy in action was Burger King’s WhopperDetour campaign, through which Burger King diverted traffic to their outlets by offering app users whopper sandwiches at dirt-cheap prices as long as they were in the vicinity (within 600 feet) of a McDonald’s.
The best thing about this technique is that only the people willing to make a purchase will see your ads, so converting them into paying customers is not much of a problem.
Target Nearby Events
People love to attend events. They also love the excitement of building up to an occasion that they are planning to attend. You can take advantage of this excitement by implementing a hyperlocal ad campaign targeted at that event.
Every marketer knows that it is easier to sell to a happy person than to an angry one.
Another apparent advantage of an event is that people from areas far from your location are likely to visit them, which can help increase your brand awareness far beyond your business’s physical location.
Don’t Forget The Traditional Hyperlocal Marketing with Out-of-Home Advertising
Out-of-home advertising is the oldest form of hyperlocal marketing. It leverages ads placed physically in the vicinity of the business. Billboards and other signage that grab attention and convey a message to the audience are examples of OOH advertising.
While it is not cool anymore to use billboards and signage, OOH has kept pace with modern times. You can use digital signage and billboards to continue your online hyperlocal marketing campaign offline. It will impact the customer journey and have higher chances of conversions.
Conclusion
Hyperlocal marketing campaigns are an excellent way of driving traffic to brick-and-mortar outlets. Today, when the competition for customer attention is stiff, you need to step up your marketing game to achieve your objectives.
Hyperlocal marketing can prove to be a much-needed boost for your business activities.
We are getting conditioned to think that the world is a tiny place, and no customer is out of our reach. Still, sometimes it is more beneficial to target a small group via hyperlocal advertising to improve your lead quality.
By running hyperlocal ad campaigns, you reduce the cost per lead while simultaneously increasing your return on ad spending (ROAS), which is a win-win for any enterprise.
