Hyperlocal Advertising: 3 Tips for Reaching Local Audiences

The relevance of your advertising is directly related to your campaign ROI. When ads are delivered to consumers who fit the profile of your target consumer, you’re inevitably more likely to turn that prospect into a customer.

A wide range of data points may be used to define that ideal consumer, but for local businesses, location is almost inevitably part of the formula: not only does proximity play a large role in determining where customers spend their money, local businesses typically want to concentrate their resources on building up a customer base in their local community.

By that logic, hyperlocal advertising can offer the perfect balance of targeting precision, local relevance and optimized cost that many local businesses are seeking for their digital ad campaigns. When properly planned and executed, hyperlocal campaigns can offer a simple path to increasing your local market share and laying a foundation for continued growth.

Interested in growing your local business through hyperlocal advertising? Here are three of our favorite tips for building hyperlocal success.

1. Target Ad Delivery by Both Local Presence and Local Relevance

Location-based advertising isn’t as simple as filtering your audience targeting through a single geographic data point. For best results, hyperlocal campaigns should tailor audience targeting through not only physical location, but also local audience interests.

For example, proximity-based targeting can be a great tool for only delivering ads to consumers within a certain geographic radius of your business. Likewise, addressable TV and other geotargeting filters can restrict ad delivery to specific neighborhoods, ZIP codes, or other geographic criteria.

But other steps can be taken to further tailor ads to a locally engaged audience. Local news programming or local websites, for example, can help you ensure delivery of ads to local community members, rather than consumers who just happen to be located within a certain geographic area. Likewise, media buys can be planned around digital videos and other content that offers local relevance, such as local travel programming or seasonal content related to local festivals, traditions, and/or holiday events.

Seek out local content creators, including local YouTube channels and local original content from services like YurView, to refine hyperlocal targeting and prioritize ad delivery to a niche, highly relevant audience.

2. Plan Ad Campaigns and Media Buys Around Local Sports Programming

Live sports delivered via cable TV or streaming offer highly engaged audiences to target with branded ads. Instead of blowing your budget on the Super Bowl, though, local businesses can get better value, and at a much lower cost, by advertising around live sports events.

At the high school and small-college level, live streaming and TV broadcasts of these events have exploded in recent years, due in large part to sustained audience demand. In select local markets, for example, YurView’s GameTime service offers high school, local college and even professional sports events through YurView’s local cable programming and online streaming services.

YurView ad inventories available during these events can be an excellent option for reaching a local, relevant audience through an engaging, proven advertising channel.

3. Optimize for Hyperlocal Search

Even if you’ve optimized your website and ad campaigns to target local keywords, hyperlocal SEO offers another degree of location-based specificity—and if your business does it right, it can help you connect with local consumers through search and other digital channels.

Hyperlocal SEO focuses on location-specific queries that are specific not only to individual towns or parts of a city, but even the neighborhoods, streets, local landmarks and other geographic markers relevant to your business. These hyperlocal keywords offer niche targeting that can be more affordable due to lower competition. While the volume of related traffic will be lower, the relevance can be incredibly high.

To optimize ad campaigns for local search, prioritize the following steps:

• Make sure your Google My Business listing is up-to-date and features accurate information. A complete, accurate profile will benefit paid search and other sponsored ads.
• Target hyperlocal keywords in paid search and other digital ad campaigns. Experiment with different hyperlocal terms to see which ones deliver the best results over time.
• Make sure hyperlocal terms are reflected on your business website and in your ad messaging. Consistency matters with these hyperlocal strategies. You want the messaging in your ad to be aligned with the search intent of your targeted consumer.

Hyperlocal audience targeting can be a delicate balancing act, requiring an ad strategy that defines a specific audience without overlaying so many filters that your targeting becomes too narrow in scope. A digital advertising partner can help you identify the best mix of data points to optimize your hyperlocal strategy for the best results.

Ready to get started? Contact Cox Media today.