Geo-targeting + Cinco de Mayo: How to maximize location-based mobile marketing to grow your business
Location-based mobile marketing is a great way to display your contextual creative to the right audience at the right time. Tune in to learn more about geo-targeting strategies for Facebook and Instagram.
Geo-targeting + Cinco de Mayo: How to maximize location-based mobile marketing to grow your business
Hello, good afternoon. I’m Michael Winn, Chief Digital Officer of Digital Opps, a division of RB Oppenheim Associates. Thanks for joining me today on the video podcast where we talk about digital marketing strategies to grow your business.
Today we’re going to talk about geo-targeting and Cinco de Mayo. Yes for those of you that had great time yesterday celebrating Cinco de Mayo at your favorite watering hole or Mexican food place, wherever you chose to celebrate that event. I want to talk about how businesses can maximize location-based mobile marketing to grow your business. So I think about yesterday when I was sitting with my friends at a local Mexican food restaurant and we were enjoying chips and salsa and queso and fajitas and we were there for probably a good four hours, much longer than normal lunch would be or dinner at that restaurant. And while we were there,of course, in between conversations, there was a good group of five or six of us there and the ladies would talking about things and the guys would talk about things then guys and girls would go back and forth. There were times where each of us would jump on our phone and we would check Instagram or Facebook, we would even check in, we took pictures, used hashtags.
All of what was happening in the real world is this experience that was taking place was being shared on the social web. And understand a business that understands that this is a fundamental way a lot of society thinks about “hey I’m actually going to this place and when I get there I’m already thinking about what kind of selfie I’m going to take and a group shot” like that is the world we live in. So when you understand that as a business owner, okay I’ve got a large group of potential customers based on the fact that they’re in this location and they are spending money in this location at this date or very specific reason, if that were to fall in line with your products and services you should capitalize on that opportunity and leverage location-based geo-targeting capability.
3 Ways to Think About Location-Based Marketing
So Facebook and Instagram the ad platform, thinks about location based marketing serving three ways: A.) target for people who are living in this area B.) people who have recently visited this location or C.) people who are traveling to this location. So those are the three parts of location-based metrics or behaviors that you can then tie into your mobile marketing campaign. Now again obviously, if I’m visiting a location, I’m mobile, I’m going there and I’m going to be visiting and spending some time in that brick-and-mortar location. So for all of the patio companies or landscaping companies that do patio design or maybe your furniture company or maybe you do outdoor landscaping, one of the things I found was really interesting as a lot of people wanted to sit outside yesterday.
And so that behavior of I’m going to spend money and one of the things I’m going to spend money on is being outdoors with people I like and enjoying and have a good time. So that behavior is something that if I’m a business and my product or service lends itself to that kind of behavior like patio furniture company or outdoor landscaping company you want to target those behaviors. What about if you’re a liquor store owner, you would want to target people who are going out and spending money on food and drinks on a special occasion. Because we can spend our money on lot of things but when we demonstrate by our geographical behavior that on this date, on this time I wanted to spend my money and this is where I chose to spend it that really tells you something about that user and their buying habits in their patterns. So you’ll really understanding that is huge.
Using the Facebook Platform
Now the thing that you have to be aware of is on the Facebook platform you only have a one mile radius is minimum you can sort of circle around. Well I don’t want a whole mile around that Mexican restaurant or wherever that location is that you’re trying to target. Maybe you’re a wedding photographer and you want to target on Sundays or Saturdays this one particular venue does a lot of weddings and you might want to zone in very specifically on that area. So one of the tactics that you can use to make sure you exclude that. To put exclusions in your rule, and you can do that with a pin and say exclude this, you can put a pin and exclude a zip code to really box in that very specific brick-and-mortar location so that you can target those users. I think the other part to really understand it and I think about is there a next logical location that they’re going to stop at right after that location. So I wonder how people went to a local restaurant that serves Mexican food yesterday and they immediately left there and drove to a liquor store to take the party back to their house. What was the next step and I think that there’s a lot of information like how many people go to you know the grocery store first and then they go to you know the gas station next.
Leveraging Geofencing and Geo-Targeting
And what does that tell you? So understanding your customers and where to put up your sign, like you see them today on the street corner “we buy houses” or whatever in there on a very specific location. But with geofencing and geo-targeting you have the ability to really leverage, so if there are specific patterns within your local market you can leverage that to your advantage and provide mobile marketing display messages and ads in a contextual way that your folks will respond to. And I think the other thing that’s really important to is making sure that targeted me great like I was there and I was on the patio and I was having a great time and even while I’m there or right after I leave I go back to my house. When I see an ad for a patio set, it’s on sale now for Mother’s Day and 20% off or whatever the the special offer is you can you really have to kind of think it through strategically about what I’m about to do before I do it based on historical patterns. Or based on trends or locations or businesses that are in your town that you know will have historically performed well.
Leveraging this idea against your competitors is also a really smart, savvy digital marketing play. If you’re understanding that people aren’t coming to your location or business but are going to your competitor’s, leverage that. Drop a pin on that location and say if I was a car dealership in Georgia and I was trying to market to the big city that’s in Florida, just south of here. I would do target marketing based on people visiting the dealership at my competitors. Or if I was a liquor store owner, I would look at other businesses. If I was a restaurateur and I saw people were going to no other barbecue shops. I would target people who visited barbecue shops so that as a barbecue restaurateur people would come to me as well.
Being Mobile-Optimized is Key
Always remember that the landing page that you build, it’s connected to these ads needs to be mobile-optimized. I know we talked about this last week but again I think it’s super important make sure your information is relevant, direct, to the point, mobile-optimized and don’t forget to collect your own first-party data. So you want to take that sort of ambiguous Facebook user information, have them come to your website and then for a free whatever you’re able to have them put in you know their name and email address or just email address to get great offers. That is how you capitalize on geo-targeting and Cinco de Mayo and how to maximize location-based mobile marketing efforts for your business. Thank you guys for joining in today, my name is Michael Winn and I’ll see you guys tomorrow. Hope you have a great day!