Deepen your understanding of hyper-local targeting as a means to enhance your marketing strategy.
This is the sixth post in our Retail Marketing series, dedicated to helping brands improve their marketing ROI and accelerate revenue growth by identifying and converting their most profitable audience segments.
Let’s DELVE deeper into Hyper-Local Targeting and review how and why you should leverage it to improve campaign performance metrics and stretch your marketing/media budget.
What is Hyper-Local Targeting?
The strategy focuses on reaching consumers who are physically close to a retailer’s location within a given timeframe by accessing a prospect’s mobile device location data. Offers can be delivered as push notifications, video, mobile, display, or in-app ads, and they are extremely topical since, according to Google, mobile searches with “the words ‘near me’ that contain a variant of ‘can I buy’ or ‘to buy’” grew more than 500 percent between December 2015 and 2017.
Thousands of apps ask consumers for permission to turn on location services in order to determine their location. When that permission is given the location is then passed along to ad networks that support hyper-local targeting. Retailers who have purchased placement can then serve ads to prospects that come into close proximity of their stores. The strategy can be super charged if the retailer and ad network can connect a consumer’s location user data to past behaviors as well as demographic and psychographic data.
Hyper local targeting isn’t just for online advertising, either. It can and should be leveraged across channels including social, mobile, television and radio, and display since it can support media targeting efforts enabling appropriate and relevant dynamic messaging for customers based on their location and what we know about each location. This leads to more effective messaging to help cut through the digital media clutter, driving to stronger conversions.
Why is Hyper-Local Targeting important?
Retailers purchase different stock for different stores around the country. A department store might only stock swimsuits year-round in the south and Midwest. The very nature of this mix as well as the ever-changing demographics and needs of Americans leads many marketers to differentiate their media buys using hyper-local targeting—targeting prospects down to and beyond the granular Zip code level and specific demographic and psychographic groups—will do better and improve sales.
Given COVID’s impact on in-store shopping, the idea of hyper-local advertising recently morphed to include terms such as “curbside pickup near me” and “local stores that are open late,” for instance. Google reports that searches for “curbside pickup” and “safe shopping” increased tenfold since the pandemic began. And Retail Dive shares that “As many retailers struggle with declines in store visits because of the pandemic, personalized maps with more complete and customized information about nearby locations and their shopping options may help to rebound foot traffic.”
An example of successful integration of Hyper-Local Targeting is women’s fashion retailer, Torrid, boosted its email marketing program by including personalized maps, pushing click-throughs from less than five percent to more than 15 percent this past summer. While new patterns like this are emerging, these examples shows why it’s so crucial to have a data- driven strategy and approach.
This topic will take on more urgency as we move forward into what will be a cookie-less future. Google is currently phasing out its use of cookies, which means it will become more difficult to track people down to the individual level; and IAB reports that, “57.1% of marketers report increased first part data use in 2020 due to Google’s phase out of the cook.”
This is where second-party data enrichment and heat maps can make a difference to identify and target similar audience clusters, based on location and informed by hyper-local demographics and psychographic data.
Again, more focused targeting means you are not over-buying ad reach for audiences that won’t convert. It also means that you can improve your campaign performance metrics and stretch your marketing/media budget.
In our next article in this series, we’ll DELVE deeper into Conversion Probability, an automated prospecting tool to boost conversion.
Ready to take your ads, and your business, to the next level? Get in touch with the DELVE team today.