Hyperlocal Marketing: What Is It, and Why Should Local Businesses Care?

Visibility, exposure and local brand awareness doesn’t happen overnight. When local businesses commit to setting roots in their local community and becoming a recognized fixture in the community, they are committing for the long haul—and trusting not only the strength of their brand experience, but also the long-term success of their advertising and marketing.

Even with a limited marketing budget, investments into visibility and audience reach can pay dividends when growing your customer base and your incoming revenue. But how you allocate those marketing funds can affect your campaign ROI and the geographic makeup of your customer base.

Hyperlocal marketing is the strategic solution your business might be looking for. While a local approach to targeting can help you focus marketing efforts based on proximity and other criteria, hyperlocal marketing takes these efforts even further, enhancing location-specific targeting to offer more accuracy and precision for your marketing campaigns.

Read on to learn more about how hyperlocal marketing works, and what kind of benefits it offers your business.

Hyperlocal Marketing, Defined

Location has always played an important role in advertising and marketing, going all the way back to ads placed in the newspaper, on the radio and on television. But the pinpoint precision of these campaigns has always been limited: you could deliver an ad to an entire city or possibly a part of an entire city, for example, but you couldn’t pick and choose the individual neighborhoods where your ads were viewed by consumers.

Thanks to hyperlocal marketing, though, you can. In fact, hyperlocal marketing can even use geofencing and addressable advertising to pinpoint ad recipients down to individual street addresses.

Want to deliver a mobile ad to the occupants of a specific office building? No problem. Eager to deploy digital TV ads to residents of a local subdivision who meet certain demographic criteria? It’s easily done. Just as your target audience is often mindful of location and proximity when searching for local businesses, hyperlocal targeting helps businesses account for geography in their marketing strategy.

Harnessing Better Data to Enhance Audience Engagement

Like any other targeted marketing and advertising campaigns, hyperlocal marketing is only effective when supported by reliable location and audience data—ensuring that your marketing budget is only spent on highly relevant, engaged consumers.

When planned, launched and managed by a trusted marketing professional, your hyperlocal approach can deliver a number of business benefits, including the following:

• A more relevant—and hopefully responsive—target audience. When geography is properly accounted for, your marketing reach isn’t wasted on prospects outside of your target geographic area.
• A simpler path to conversion for your customer. When consumers are seeking out local search results, your hyperlocal marketing campaigns offer convenience and simplicity in connecting them to a local solution.
• Tightly controlled ad budgets. The restricted geographic audience identified by hyperlocal campaigns asserts greater control over the scope of your spending.
• Easy allocation of budgets to grow market share. Unlike other campaigns aimed at building local brand awareness, hyperlocal strategies can focus resources and spending to prioritize specific geographic areas.
• Simpler reporting to understand campaign performance. By eliminating geographic variables in performance, your business can use campaign reports to identify other elements that may be affecting your marketing ROI.

Improving SEO Through Hyperlocal Optimization

The rise of mobile devices has greatly increased the role of geography in mobile search and other online activities. Whether at home or on the move, hyperlocal SEO can harness your target consumers’ desire for local results via mobile and online search.

Your business can improve its hyperlocal SEO through a few easy steps:

• Set up and manage your ‘Google My Business’ profile. Google My Business is an easy-to-use and powerful marketing tool that will elevate your appearance in local and hyperlocal search results based on your business address, operating hours, service area, and other relevant information.
• Use hyperlocal keywords throughout your website. Depending on the hyperlocal focus of your marketing, consider making mentions to the borough, neighborhood, subdivisions, school districts, and other names and terms used within your community. This will help your website and content rank highly in relevant hyperlocal searches.
• Add structured data to your website to better identify your website for hyperlocal searches. This schema will aid Google in recognizing your business and website as being relevant to hyperlocal search queries for your consumers. In addition to hyperlocal keywords, this schema can help your business rank higher in online search results.

Could Your Business Benefit from Local Influencer Marketing?

You don’t need access to a local celebrity to take advantage of local influencer marketing. In fact, the best bang for your marketing buck can often be found with an affordable influencer who offers a strong local reputation and influence among your target local audience.

This local influencer will likely have a modest but highly engaged social media presence, and their visibility will be particularly high among your targeted geographic areas. Consider former local politicians, real estate agents, and current or former athletes with local roots as possible candidates for a cost-effective, engaging influencer campaign. The influencer campaign itself doesn’t have to be expensive, but it could be instrumental in building local brand awareness—and you can combine these ads with geographic filters to refine your audience, and the scope of your campaign.

If you’re eager to make use of geofencing and other hyperlocal marketing strategies, seek out a digital advertising partner that offers the right mix of technology, data and professional experience to plan and launch successful hyperlocal campaigns.

Cox Media’s experts can leverage our proprietary marketing solutions to enhance geotargeting and achieve cost-effective, results-driven audience targeting. Contact us today to get started.