Small business hyperlocal marketing is about reaching your target customers in your trade area. If you know your customers will travel 2.5 miles to your business, that’s your trade area. It will then be important to deliver marketing to people in that 2.5 mile trade area.
There are multiple companies that make hyperlocal advertising possible, including Brill Media. We use tools including Basis, RTBIQ, Foursquare, Simpli.fi and The Trade Desk to reach targeted customers in a businesses trade area.
The article speaks to the marketing playbook that’s available through American Express and their small business initiative. Take into account that 85% of American adults have smart phones, with higher compositions among Hispanic and African American audiences, it’s critical to acknowledge and use the power that smart phones make available to consumers.
What is that power? It’s the latitude and longitude coordinates of the smartphone that are being passed back to mobile apps and advertising companies who track that information. The power comes from consumers who are able to make decisions about where they want to eat with a few quick taps into Yelp, Instagram and Open Table. It’s the searches that a consumer will conduct on the run while they are shopping. Finally, it’s the points of interaction the consumer takes while they wait, and they get onto Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest to share a story, place a comment, or watch a video. At all these points there are opportunities for your business to interject, communicate a message, provide value and make your marketing as intelligent and sophisticated as the work that enterprise marketers do.
The latitude and longitude marketing is a straight forward part of geo-location advertising. Say you want to reach people a mile around a location where your consumer shops. Place a pin, and serve ads to all the people in that geo-radius. When they go onto a mobile app and get an ad, we want your business’ ad to be seen. This all becomes much more valuable than standard advertising because you can send very specific messages to people because you know where they are right now. This is precision marketing, and it’s scalable. Marketers are replicating that targeting across the country, the state or the city. For a quick service restaurant there are ads being served right now to people who visit competitive restaurants. Using geo-aware create your ads speak to the opportunity available to the consumer: a map with a location to your restaurant that shows the exact distance between where the consumer is right now, and the store address.
Social messaging is key, and very different from social advertising. This is ensuring that people are posting content about your business, and tagging your business in those posts, as an element of social proof. For restaurants, as an example, the key here is to post your own social messaging on sites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Yelp. It’s then working with influencers who have social reach and that tag their food pictures to your owned social media accounts.
Social content marketing is important to this ecosystem because people are communicating messages to their friends, families and followers. Messages are based on passions, interests and exciting real world events that need to be shared right now. On Twitter, Facebook and Instagram serve ads to people down to a mile radius of your store address. Use your videos, pictures and compelling text to reach a very precise audience: people who are within a mile of your restaurant, and who are interested in specific things related to your business, such as foodies for restaurants and sneakerheads for a retail shoe store.
In mobile search ads serve customized ad copy that links to your page and your offer based on targeted search terms. This is a use of standard search marketing, and for geo-location advertisers you can ensure your ads are served down to cities and zip codes.
