4 Trusted Tips for the Best Location-Based Marketing Campaigns
December 16, 2020 by
When it comes to geofencing marketing, there are as many uses as there are businesses. We work with agencies, brands and media companies around the U.S., and we see the many ways advertisers leverage precise location data to understand reach and measure audiences they want to target. While the campaigns vary, patterns have emerged over time.
To help you ensure you get the most value from your geofencing marketing efforts, we want to share the four most reliable tactics for location-based marketing.
- Retarget your customers to get them to come back or shop online
- Use cross-device matching
- Win over new customers
- Thinking outside the box
1. Retarget your customers to get them to come back or shop with you online
Every marketer knows that the cost of retaining a customer is far less than winning new customers. The first location-based marketing campaign tip is how to get your customers coming back for more. Location-based marketing allows you to target and serve ads to people who have been inside your store, even if they are not in your CRM or CDP.
Whether your customers visited your store a week ago or a year ago, they are available to be in your location-based audience to retarget. You can offer them loyalty programs, specials, or simply remind them how much they loved your products or services and ask them to come back.
You can also use this tactic to ensure your shoppers stick with you through your ecommerce store, for times when online shopping is more convenient or necessary.
A great example of how to use this location-based marketing tip is with neighborhood Italian food chain Comella’s, based in Massachusetts. If marketers for the restaurant wanted to retarget Comella’s diners, they could create a retargeting audience in VISIT Local. In this example, they have an audience of 3,200 diners to advertise to across Facebook and other social media sites to showcase new menu items or tried-and-true favorites.
For more on getting customers back in stores, check out our blog post “The Complete Guide to Using Geotargeting to Get Customers Back Into Stores”.
2. Use cross-device matching
Location-based marketing doesn’t only allow marketers to reach customers they know have been to specific locations, but to also reach all decision-makers in a household. Because cross-device matching enables you to target mobile devices within a household, this tip can increase your reach by boosting audience sizes up to 300 percent. It also allows marketers to target multiple devices owned by the same user — cell phone, tablet, laptop, and more.
A marketer for a grocery store chain can make great use of this tip. Let’s say the husband in a household does the grocery shopping and his wife makes the list. Without cross-device matching, only the husband’s mobile device would show up in the audience of visitors to the grocery store. Using cross-device matching, grocery marketers can reach the wife who actually selects what goes on the list. What’s more, she may be suggesting new brands to try based on offers she and her husband receive.
Let’s look at another example of how to use cross-device matching, this time with roommates making a purchase decision together. They need a new couch for their apartment. One roommate has been shopping a few times at different furniture stores, but both plan to make the purchase decision together. Without cross-device matching, only the roommate who has been out shopping would show up in the audience of furniture store visitors. But with cross-device matching, marketers can advertise to both roommates and entice them to buy a couch from their store rather than from their competitor.
3. Win over new customers
Another location-based marketing tip to win more market share is targeting your competitors’ visitors. This tip has the distinct advantage of being effective, valuable and easy to do. First, list all of your competitors you’d like to target. Thinking apples to apples — Moe’s Southwest Grill would target Chipotle. Fitness Connection would target Planet Fitness. SuperCuts would target Great Clips. The local coffee shop would target Starbucks. To expand your audience to reach other in-market audiences, you can also target indirect competitors. Moe’s Southwest Grill’s digital agency saw success with targeting diners at local Mexican restaurants to win new business and saw an increase of 67% in-app downloads and coupon redemption. Read the full case study to get more ideas.
4. Thinking outside the box
Thinking creatively is crucial to creating successful location-based marketing campaigns. This means you have to think beyond retargeting your own customers and your competitors’ customers and finding your audience in other places they go. For example, if you are trying to reach moms of young children you have to think about where these moms would spend their time. They likely shop at stores like Gymboree and Target. Maybe they go to nail salons. They may work out at gyms near their child’s preschool and attend birthday parties on Saturdays at party places like Chuck E Cheese. These are all locations you’d want to target to reach moms.
Another great example of thinking outside the box to reach a high-intent audience is what a digital agency did to drive visits to a website designed to educate the public on a new law to make sports betting legal. The agency geofenced sporting arenas and used fans attending games as the foundation for their audience. They figured if these fans loved sports enough to spend money on tickets, they may be interested in making sports betting legal. The agency saw success with this campaign and ultimately helped to pass a yes vote on the legislation. Read the full case study.
We hope these location-based marketing campaign tips are helpful to get your gears turning. For help brainstorming all the locations you want to geofence to capture the most high-intent audiences, download our Geofencing Marketing Template. And when you are ready to get started, contact us for a demo of VISIT Local.
