What is Geotargeted Marketing?
Geotargeting, also known as geotargeted advertising or geo-advertising, delivers marketing content within a defined geographic boundary to customers who meet specified criteria. In addition to targeting people within a defined radius, geotargeting in marketing allows brands to hone in on customers based on behaviors and demographics.
For example, in retail, ads can be delivered to segments of your mobile app audience when they are near a brick-and-mortar store. Geotargeting can also exclude audiences and locations that you don’t want to target. The result? Highly personalized and relevant messages that can drive significant engagement and ROI at just the right moment.
Geotargeting vs. Geofencing
Geofencing and geotargeting are both types of location-based marketing.
- Geofencing is often associated with Radar’s platform or Infillion (formerly Gimbal)’s beacon technology. It involves defining a specific geographic parameter, known as a “fence,” and delivering ads to all customers within that radius.
- Geotargeting takes this concept further, using behavior and demographic data to more narrowly target a defined audience within a geo radius. For example, a retailer could target push notifications to female app users who are near a store and have purchased women’s shoes in the past. This powerful combination of behavior and location data provides yet another layer to marketers’ ability to provide a tailored, contextual experience for customers.
Benefits of Geotargeting
Geotargeting empowers you to focus on the areas where you’ll find the right customers and exclude areas where you won’t. It also allows you to run different ads in different locations, which can be optimized for the distinct audiences in each place. Consumers often experience this through Google pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which serves different and often local content depending on where you are located.
Additional benefits include:
- Personalization: Increase engagement and brand affinity
- Reduced acquisition costs: Lower average cost-per-click (CPC), drive more conversions and make campaigns more cost-effective
- More accurate targeting: Reach customers who live or move about in a certain area, making content more relevant while reducing wasted impressions and clicks
- Enhanced UX: Engage customers at the time and place they are most wanted, delivering more valuable brand-defining moments
- Boost local SEO: Provide customers with locally relevant search results
- Competitive advantage: Hide ads from your competitors based on their IP address
How Does Geotargeting Work?
The key to geotargeting in marketing is location data, such as country, city, zip code, IP address or device ID. With traditional location-based advertising, advertisers serve or restrict ads in specific locations to focus their ad spend on the places their customers are located. However, the mobile era has allowed marketers to get even more targeted and reach customers based on their individual GPS and proximity to local “beacons,” which receive information from nearby devices via Bluetooth. So, when a customer opts into location sharing on a mobile app and enters one of those defined areas, you can use automation to trigger relevant personalized ads, push notifications or other content.
Additional granularity is achieved when this location data is combined with demographics and other customer intelligence gleaned from app activity and mobile search behavior. You can target ads not only to people in a specific location but also to people who’ve shown interest in a location, a product or a service relevant to your business.
For example, a coffee shop can use geotargeted marketing to deliver personalized offers and information tailored to a customer’s coffee preferences and the location where they typically pick up their lattes. This creates a cohesive digital and in-store experience for your customers.
Radius Targeting
Radius targeting falls under the umbrella of geotargeting. Marketers can use it to draw a simple circular boundary around a specific location and target people within that precisely defined geographic area, which might include pieces of multiple cities or ZIP codes.
Radius targeting is different from geofencing in that it uses location data from mobile devices to identify users within the radius, rather than creating irregularly shaped virtual boundaries with GPS or RFID to trigger automations when someone enters the geofenced area. This method attracts people nearby with highly relevant messages and offers. For example, a restaurant could send a discount offer to mobile app users within a one-mile radius during lunch hours who may be looking for a place to eat.
Using radius targeting, advertisers can also adjust ad bids based on proximity. For instance, a retail store might increase its ad bids for users within a half-mile radius compared to those within a two-mile radius, ensuring the most relevant audience gets the offer. You can also set different bids for various distances; a five-mile radius might have a $1.50 bid, while a two-mile radius might have a $1.75 bid. This way, businesses with multiple locations can tailor their strategies to each site’s specific needs, drive local engagement and boost foot traffic to physical locations.
How Geotargeting Works in Different Advertising Platforms
Geotargeting capabilities vary across different advertising platforms. Each offers unique ways to reach your target audience based on location. Here are a few examples:
- Google Ads: Reach people based on countries, regions, cities or a radius around a certain area. Use location groups such as places of interest or business locations, and set exclusions to prevent waste as a result of targeting the wrong people.
- Facebook Ads: Target users by country, region, city or even more specific areas like free trade zones or emerging markets. Monitor ad performance and reallocate your budget to the best-performing locations for your ads.
- Instagram Ads: Use location tags on posts to increase engagement and target ads to users near your physical locations. Select specific states, provinces, cities or countries for your ad campaigns.
- Snapchat Ads: Target people based on country, state, postal code, address and more. Reach users within a specific distance from a location through radius targeting or use Location Categories to target them based on location type or user activity.
- X Ads: Target users in specific countries, metro areas or postal codes based on their recent location data from IP addresses, GPS or Wi-Fi signals.
Each platform’s geotargeting features allow you to deliver relevant and timely ads to people based on their location. Doing so can enhance the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
Geotargeting Use Cases
Provide a Highly Personalized Digital Experience for Event Attendees
The South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, Texas connected a mobile wallet pass with the SXSW GO app to unite the entire digital experience while boosting mobile engagement. The app offered guests an easy way to browse lineups, build their personal schedules and see which sessions their friends were attending.
With Infillion (formerly Gimbal)’s location intelligence and Airship’s mobile engagement capabilities integrated into the app, attendees received Guest Pass event alerts and personalized recommendations based on their location and schedules. Over 1,300 strategically-placed beacons led to the delivery of 415,000+ location-triggered notifications — allowing SXSW to understand how attendees interacted with their festival.
Increase Engagement Through Location Targeting
William Hill, one of the world’s most established sports betting outlets, uses location-based push notifications to send targeted offers, such as a free bet, based on a customer’s location.
Using segmentation tags and location profiles, William Hill’s location-targeted messages achieve 400% greater engagement than non-targeted messages. Alex Rutherford, head of the mobile sportsbook, explains that William Hill’s push notification strategy “is not to overwhelm the customer but ensure at all times that every message they receive is absolutely relevant.”
Create an Amazing On-Site Experience
The Sacramento Kings provide an extra-special on-site game-day experience for attendees via personalized notifications and location awareness. When fans approach Golden 1 Center, the app sends personalized greetings to their lock screens.
To accomplish this, the Kings use Airship’s personalization templates with Real-Time Data Streaming, which “listens” for any devices that come into proximity of a beacon in or around the arena. The combined solutions pull information about an individual user (from the team’s third-party data vendor) and automatically create a personalized message nearly instantaneously. The Kings can also configure the template to include other customized information such as favorite player, ticket-holder status and more.
Unique and engaging notifications drive fans to use the app in the arena to guide their experience and see up to a 41% indirect open rate.
Deliver Real-Time, Location-Based Offers
GasBuddy, which helps its app customers find the best gas prices, has partnered with dozens of major brands for its popular GasBack rewards program. The company integrates Radar with Airship to trigger automated push notifications based on user location events. Every time mobile app users enter a geofenced retail location, they automatically get a limited-time GasBack offer on their lock screen.
Turn to Airship for Geotargeted Marketing Help
With geotargeted marketing, companies can be there for customers at the time and place they want — the precise moments that truly define their relationship with your brand. Want to learn more about how geotargeted marketing can deliver personalized, loyalty-winning experiences? Contact us today!