Advertising helps to gain visibility and gain new customers. For each communication strategy, there is a corresponding marketing method and fundamentals to know. We will now focus on the benefits of location-based advertising. This lever of physical and digital marketing makes it possible to target a specific geographical area to attract qualified customers.
Why advertise geolocated?
It is relevant to identify your target before launching a communication campaign.
This allows you to focus on prospects potentially interested in your offers. In communication, quality is more important than quantity, especially for traders and e-traders. Targeting your area of action will, therefore, save you time and money.
Here is a panel of different techniques, you choose the one that suits you:
1) Targeting customers via a database
Any type of business needs to build a database of information about its customers. Indeed, each customer represents a new sales opportunity.
In the case of a B2B activity, it is even possible to buy a base of prospects from specialized companies.
The important thing is to recover, at least, the name and email address and, if possible, a phone or a postal address.
Once this information about your prospects or customers harvested, you just have to contact them by the approach you want (SMS, emailing, phoning, door to door, etc.) to encourage them to return to the store.
This marketing strategy is a great way to build customer loyalty from the moment you have created a first contact file.
2) Door-to-door
Visiting each of your customers one by one is a simple and effective method but requires a significant investment of time and money.
The visit of a sales representative to a potential client may lead to a deterioration of the image of the company because of the intrusive nature of the marketing method.
This method can still be unusual in the case of high shopping carts.
The distribution of flyers by hand or mailbox can be a more feasible alternative.
3) Distribution of leaflets in the street
Flyer distribution is a tool for mass distribution at low cost. It takes on average 250 € for the printing and distribution of 1000 flyers distributed in mailboxes. The price is more economical if you spread them yourself on the street.
As the street is a public place where all types of customers mix, it is essential for you to target your area of distribution. For example, position yourself near a metro station to target young or big-box prospects for a more family-oriented clientele (on supermarket car parks, a permit from the shopping centre is mandatory).
Be creative: vary your modes and broadcast media to fit the message you want to convey.
A Canadian beauty centre, for example, covered a man with wax strips and wandered the streets urging the passer-by to remove them. On the pieces where a discount coupon for hair removal.
4) Street signage
Billboards and other banners are advertising media found daily in the city. Often located near commercial areas or busy roads, this method is reserved for large groups wishing to reach a broad target.
Distributing small, original gifts to your customers to turn them into a travelling sandwich man can be a potent trick for triggering word of mouth. We can, for example, think of an original bag that will be used by your customers even after buying it at home.
5) Local media
Local media, often small in size, are an excellent vehicle for communication. It is both quick and easy to broadcast your offers in newspapers or radios.
Although it is possible to target a geographical area approximately, the news diaries do not allow to bring a high precision in the targeted clientele.
If the solutions proposed by your company are original or if you have significant success, you can consider being interviewed by a local media, and thus free you from paying advertising costs. This can also be the case if you put in place a marketing strategy that makes the buzz.
6) Partnership and sponsorship
The company is a great way to gain visibility at low cost.
The principle is to associate with a prescriber or a company offering complementary services to your business to promote your products to its prospects.
It is essential to identify upstream which companies are located close to yours and likely to have a direct influence on your traffic.
Sporting, artistic and associative events can be good ways to gain visibility and refine the image consumers have of you. Grouping with other traders to launch local initiatives can also be interesting.
You can also use local influencers to enhance your brand image. Partnerships can be varied depending on your business and your store. If you have a restaurant, you can invite them to enjoy your dish of the day against a publication on their Instagram account. If you sell fashion items, you can play on product placement. There is also the strategy of the contest that will allow you to win fans well targeted on your various media!
7) Having visibility on the Internet
The “store locator” is a digital strategy consisting of a web page listing the stores of a company with their coordinates. To increase its transformation rate, we can integrate a geolocation tool to locate the point of sale closest to the position of the user.
But, it is also relevant to geolocate your point of sale for stores with only one store.
Google My Business, for example, is a tool that allows you to have a virtual and attractive showcase.
A blog can also allow you to be recognized as a specialist in your field of activity and thus make you more readily known. Provided you feed it regularly. Otherwise, the effect will be reversed and give the impression of a dying company.
This will allow you to have more visitors to your site and sell more without “nothing” to shell out.
Internet-based advertising: an effective solution for communicating locally
Most of the previously detailed methods have significant disadvantages. They do not make it possible to target a category of consumers in a geographical area precisely, are expensive for small merchants, and most often do not provide any feedback on their efficiency.
What about local advertising on the Internet, often seen as the future of communication campaigns?
But what is geolocalized digital advertising?
Internet-based advertising is an online advertisement that is only available to users in a predefined geographic area.
Concretely, advertising on the Internet makes it possible to target customers in a specific catchment area, generally close to its business. The best for your digital marketing strategy!
Facebook offers, for example, this service and makes it possible to broadcast an ad in a specific city thanks to the information that the users have entered in their profile. Google Ads (formerly Google Adwords) is an advertising agency that also allows you to create geolocated paid ads.
Mobile marketing is ubiquitous. Applications like Waze understand this (use of traffic and community navigation). It proposes to advertise within the app when a motorist has a positioning close to your point of sale. The game Pokemon Go phenomenon, meanwhile, offers businesses to turn into a virtual arena to attract local consumers.
This new generation of Web-to-store tool looks promising, but it is no less experimental at the moment.
A tool that responds to customers’ changing consumption
To improve your targeting, be it a geographical area or a clientele, the best is the solutions offered by providers of geolocalised advertisements on the Internet.
Today, many merchants and e-merchants are passive about their communication or rely on traditional tools previously stated.
In recent years, poor business results have been the result of consumers changing their behaviour in depth. This should have been accompanied by a change in the marketing techniques used by the traders. However, on the contrary, they have been stubborn in using methods that have had their day and in making other phenomena such as weather conditions.
This is a reality, the consumer spends more and more time on the Internet (about 5 hours per day, computer and smartphone combined).
In parallel with traditional tools, local merchants must go looking for the customer wherever he is, i.e. on the Internet. And the most effective way to do this is digital geolocalized advertising.
May seem complicated at first glance, providers of geolocalised advertising have managed to make this tool simple and intuitive. All you need to do is fill in the information from your store on a platform and then fill in the offer or product to promote.
Then, with the help of the location-based advertising provider, you identify the clientele you want to reach as well as the geographic area. In just a few minutes, your offers are online, and people matching your target can discover them.
A study by BrightLocal on the time that consumers would be willing to take to drive to different types of stores.
This graph shows that for a convenience store, the customer is ready to drive for a maximum of 23 minutes. That is to say that at most, customers located in a perimeter of only 20 km are likely to visit you.
This study puts into perspective the interest of Internet-based advertising: the time of the consumer is precious, hence the importance of communicating by judiciously targeting a geographical area.
The real strength of Internet-based advertising is the efficiency of the technology used.
Indeed, your campaigns are 100% customizable. You can choose precisely your target by playing on different criteria, such as the time range of advertising or the sites on which you want to see your offers. Plus you get a real tracking, and you can quickly analyze your data: clickthrough rate, conversion rate, etc.
But what is the price of geolocalised advertising in all this?
This is all the interest in this digital strategy. For just 50 € HT, some start-up will provide you with advertising space on more than 10,000 banners on the sites of your choice.
With a clickthrough rate of up to 0.9% for 10,000 views, you can expect to bring up to 90 in-store customers depending on your offerings and your industry.
The last advantage that lies in this new web marketing tool is the “feedback” it can provide.
Indeed, you are informed in real-time of the impact of your campaigns, which allows you, ultimately. To refine your target or unlike traditional media, to correct your campaigns in a few minutes.
Gaining visibility is good, selling is better.
Whatever method you choose, you must keep in mind that your primary goal is to sell.
Building a brand image and gaining notoriety is essential but must remain a secondary strategy. This is reserved for large companies with large budgets and often, few results requested in the short term.
Internet-based advertising has understood this because it allows, for example, to gain visibility by focusing on your primary objective: to trigger a sale.
Your communication campaigns should aim to increase your sales and not to make you known.
Thus, targeting quality clientele and potentially interested in your offers makes sense now. To sum up, gaining visibility must remain a way to achieve its goal: increase your turnover.
For each communication strategy, there is a marketing method. Although Internet-based advertising is nowadays
one of the most powerful tools, it should be used in addition to other more traditional methods.
The important thing is to know how to adapt to customer consumption trends while emphasizing quality over quantity.
