Hyperlocal marketing is transforming how businesses drive local traffic to their stores. The problem, of course, is that this isn’t new. The rise of hyperlocal marketing has made the local space a very noisy place.
Fortunately, we have a solution. Here’s what businesses need to know about hyperlocal marketing, and how mobile marketing just might save your bottom line.
What is hyperlocal marketing & why should you care?
Hyperlocal marketing is exactly what it sounds like: it’s marketing, but for a tight geographic area. This area might be a whole city, a town or a zip code, but the best route is to target a specific block or neighborhood.
Hyperlocal marketing is important for two reasons:
- “Near-me” searches (e.g. “beers and wings near me”) have increased astronomically since 2014. That’s only going to continue as things like “Ok Google” and Siri drive more and more search.
- You can create a message that resonates with a specific audience. For instance, imagine you’re a corner deli. If you were going with a general message to sell bagels, you might say ‘2 for 1 bagels at Kaplansky’s.’ But if you were thinking hyperlocal, you could say ‘You already get your meat here. Why not pick up a bagel (or two)?’ That targeted approach resonates far more with your current consumers because it’s relevant to them specifically.
How to do local marketing
You don’t have to overhaul your marketing strategy to go local.
First, you need to develop the infrastructure to market to a specific audience. Fortunately, this is usually more of a tweak than a complete overhaul.
Major digital channels like Google AdWords and social media platforms will have localization options, and re-organizing your targeting is an afternoon task.
Redistributing physical assets like billboards, flyer-drops and print ads is a simple matter of re-ordering your next print run.
The challenge is in the messaging. You want to create a message that only speaks to the people in that geography.
And before you ask…
Yes, you’re going to alienate some of your customers. They won’t all get the inside-jokes you are referencing or care about the sports teams you talk about.
But that’s ok. Because local marketing is all about appealing to the specific group at the exclusion of the demographic.
There’s some basic psychology to understand here.
Humans are prone to in-group/out-group associations. It’s why sports fans are so fiercely proud of their teams and why neighborhoods have powerful identities.
By default, your organization is not in the in-group. But fortunately, groups are fluid. By engaging at a hyper-local level and referencing in-group content, you’re implicitly saying “we’re one of you, and it’s us against them.”
And that’s the crux of why local marketing works: it makes the brand one of the team instead of not one of the team.
Mobile marketing for local markets
The entrance of mobile marketing into the hyperlocal space has been a game changer.
Why?
Because you truly target the people in a given area at a specific time. When you target based on city block by address, you assume the people there live and shop near there. A completely fair assumption.
But when you use mobile marketing, you target people physically in that area.
With mobile marketing and geo-targeting, you can actually tailor your message to send time-sensitive promotions to those physically close to your store. It’s effectively narrowing your marketing universe to people who can actually walk-in in a set timeframe. With other digital targeting overlays, you have enormous potential and control to send timelier, more relevant and more compelling messaging than ever before.
Conclusion
Mobile marketing is transforming the local marketing world. With geo-capabilities now standard on smartphones, consumers can be pinpointed to an exact location. Other demographic overlays and filters available through ad networks make it easy to narrow your promotion even more. And with multiple options to push messages to consumers in real time, like push notifications or text messages, you can ensure you have a high delivery rate.
Hyperlocal mobile marketing makes it possible to send highly specific, customized messages, to a relevant audience, at exactly the time when they’re most primed to hear it.
If that doesn’t drive conversions, we don’t know what will.
Want to learn more about how to incorporate hyperlocal mobile marketing into your business’ marketing plan? Reach out to us to form a specialized plan specific to your needs!
