Geo-marketing: How to Advertise to Specific Geographic Areas

Trying to find new customers is always difficult, even for established businesses. For that reason, many businesses try to focus their advertising on a few specific areas at a time, trying to gradually build up their customer base in those areas. Of course, how to do so is not always clear. Here are some things to consider when trying to expand your customer base to specific communities.

Location, Location, Location

The best thing you can do to improve your marketing strategy for any community is to get to know that community. In fact, when businesses advertise to specific areas, the first thing many of them do is to look at data specific to the geographical area you’re trying to market to. It may sound obvious, but it’s easy to make the mistake of developing your marketing strategy based on data that’s so broad that it might not be particularly useful. For example, if you’re looking to market to the Appalachian region of the US, that’s a large area with a lot of different communities. Northern Appalachian communities have different needs than Middle and Southern Appalachian communities and can even vary within those groups. Narrowing the field as much as possible is the first step you should take in order to overcome that. If your target area is fairly small, you should try and narrow your research down to include just data in that area, and if you don’t have enough data on that area then do more research. If you can’t do more research, then you should expand your research area incrementally until you feel like you have enough data to make a good decision. If you plan on advertising all over that region, you’re probably going to divide up the region and market differently to different subsections of the region. While it may be time consuming and somewhat costly, one thing that every company should do is to visit some of the communities that they are trying to advertise to. Not only will that help you to confirm how accurate your data is, it could also grant you unique insights into that kind of community that could help you stand out compared to the competition. Instead of looking at these communities through a set of data, this provides a human element to your insight that you would not otherwise have. Obviously, you can’t do that for every community in that area, but every little bit helps.

The Web:

Any marketing agent will tell you that in this day and age, the companies that stand out the most and market the most effectively are the ones that take full advantage of the internet. Google and Facebook advertisements are extremely powerful tools that can help a business reach as many people as possible. To make them work though, you will need two things: Content and Character. Content is pretty straightforward; make posts about your company, write blogs about what you do, and show reviews people have given about your business. The more you post, the more people that will see your content and at the end of the day advertising is, in large part, about reminding people of your company. Whether or not the people seeing your ads need your product when they see them, posting new content often will help your name stick in peoples’ heads so that when they do need something you offer, they’ll think of your business. This brings us to Character. Your content needs to tell people about your company— not just things you think people will like, but things that will differentiate you from the competition. Part of the reason why visiting the communities you want to advertise to is to help you develop that character into something that those people will recognize.

Be Local

If you can advertise your company as one that genuinely understands, or even is trying to understand, the people you’re advertising to, that goes a long way toward developing trust between you and your customers. So if you want to make your marketing strategy as effective as possible, you need one that makes widely available public content that people will identify with on some level.

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