Trying to target local customers can seem complicated – especially in the context of a pandemic.
To help you, we created this simple guide of 5 local business marketing campaigns you can use today to target local customers. Use these low-cost, highly effective campaigns as plans to get local customers to come back when quarantines are lifted.
#1 Get Customers Back to Brick & Mortar Stores
One of the easiest ways to generate more revenue is to get customers
to come back again and again. You can create a retargeting campaign for those who have visited your homepage or a specific product/menu page.
But what if you don’t have an online presence and rely on random foot traffic only? First of all – tsk tsk. Second of all, keep reading.
Even if a person hasn’t visited your website, you can still
retarget them.
How?
By retargeting people who have visited the storefront. Even if you don’t collect a shopper’s contact information, you can use location data to retarget those visitors. After all, if they’ve shopped or just browsed once, they’re likely to do it again. With a display or a social media ad, you can give previous shoppers an incentive to return.
How does location based retargeting work?
Location data companies—like Reveal Mobile—have the technology to
build audiences made up of people who visit a specific location, such as
a gym, a used-car dealership, a bar, etc. This enables you to do some very smart marketing. With this technology, you can know exactly who has visited certain stores and when. Armed with that audience of privacy-compliant data, you can create a custom audience for Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or LinkedIn.
And the best part is, you’ll know that the people who make up this audience are more open to hearing from you and buying again because they’ve done it before.
This strategy allows you to cut through the noise of unqualified leads, and, instead, gives you hyper-targeted leads. Retargeting everyone who has visited your client’s store is the low-hanging fruit you can quickly deploy to start generating a campaign that drives serious ROI.
#2 Use Facebook & Google Geotargeting to Target Local Customers
Both Facebook and Google have geotargeting tools built into their ad
platforms, and their geotargeting is the fastest and easiest way to get
started using location-based marketing tactics.
If the audience you’re targeting lives in a certain city or county, you can focus in on that location and serve ads using either Facebook or Google.
You can use this tactic to add a touch of personalization with your ad
copy or design, such as “Hey, Sacramentans!” coupled with a local image that fits the campaign’s goals. And it’s an ad you can start working on and submit to Facebook or Google for approval today.
One thing to keep in mind with these ads, while both allow you to target a location, you’ll use different ad tactics for Facebook versus Google. For example, one of the biggest differences between Google and Facebook Ads is search intent.
What is search intent you say?
Google searchers are looking for something very specific, whereas Facebook users are shown ads, abruptly, based on their interests and pages they’ve interacted with. With that in mind, Facebook is more about brand awareness and Google is more about solving answering a searcher’s inquiry.
With some strategic thinking and the use of common tools, your location-based ads can start to make an impact.
#3 Think Deeper about Location Targeting for Local Customers
You can get more granular and specific with your local targeting.
For instance, you can target people based on seasonality and where they live, as Purple Mattress did in one of their most successful campaigns in the company’s history.
Their idea was, as temperatures rise in the summer, it can be hard to sleep at night. To capitalize on that, Purple started targeting social media users who lived in areas with high average temperatures, like Phoenix, with their Sleep Cool campaign.
Next, if you have a physical store, you can look at people’s proximity to your business. Denny’s restaurants did this by running a geotargeting campaign directly to those who lived within a certain radius of each restaurant.
While it’s possible to run geotargeted campaigns like these using Facebook and Google Ad’s built-in tools, you may need to customize your audiences based on specific locations they visit.
By diving deeper into location-based marketing and looking at proximity
and seasonality, you can find people who are most likely to buy from
you and sell directly to them.
#4 Target Your Local Competitor’s Customers
Another targeting strategy you can quickly implement is to look to your competitors for customers to win over. If they’re already visiting and buying from the competition, chances are they are open to considering an alternatie (that’s you).
After all, if you like tacos from Chandos, you’re likely to like tacos in general and are open to trying new ones. This was the sentiment Moe’s used to compete with Chipotle.
Marketers of all stripes attest that this is one of the most valuable tactics for winning market share and growing a business.
How to Target Your Local Competitor’s Customers
Use location-based marketing software to create an audience that can target local customers who’ve visited a competitor’s business. Then create the following campaigns:
- An awareness Ads campaign – Perfect for new businesses that need to build mind-share.
- Ads that differentiate you from the competition – Perfect for businesses that can win on their unique selling proposition.
- Ads with discounted products, or a coupon – Perfect for businesses in highly competitive categories or in mature consumer markets.
#5 Target Closely Related Businesses
Targeting the competition isn’t the only way to increase market share. If you look to target businesses that are related to your business, or businesses that customers go to before or around the same time as when buying from you, you can create a custom location-based audience based on those habits and behaviors.
For example, you can target a location-based audience from:
- Visitors who frequent physical home goods stores to sell them items for their home (think candles, pots and pans, towels, desk lamps, etc.)
- People who went to U-Haul and other truck rental locations to sell them moving-related products (think furniture, paint, lighting, etc.)
- Visitors to lifestyle-based locations (think health and wellness, wine, coffee, etc.) to sell them items related to that lifestyle, like fitness clothing and accessories to gym goers
So think about what other brands your target audience might have an affinity for. What stores do they frequent while also buying from you? Doing this will quickly give you more high intent, addressable audiences.
