Geomarketing

Every digital touchpoint represents a chance to win or lose a customer. Customers expect to find accurate, relevant information about your brand in an instant. And, they're using their preferred channels to find details relevant to their physical location.

To meet your nearby customers at moments of high intent, your brand needs to be discoverable on mapping apps, search engines, and even social media — all on a local level.

What is geomarketing?

Geomarketing describes any form of marketing that uses location data to reach a customer in the target geographical area. Typically, marketers want to meet these customers at moments of high intent. For national and international companies and franchises, geomarketing helps reach a potential customer base at a local level.

Geotargeting is useful in a geomarketing strategy. Geotargeting helps deliver content to users based on where they are, or based on past customer behavior. For example, a customer who has visited several car dealerships over the past few days may be shopping for a car. Dealers who can deliver relevant ads or offers on a new car to this interested person are more likely to make a sale.

Marketers typically geotarget people on mobile phones. Each person's geographic information says something about their environment and mindset at a given time. Used frequently by brick-and-mortar businesses, geotargeting ultimately helps drive foot traffic to physical locations.

What's the difference between geomarketing and geotargeting?

Geomarketing can include paid and organic marketing efforts, while geotargeting is more commonly associated with digital advertising.

The main benefit of geomarketing is better visibility among local customers. Consider this: 97% of users will turn to search engines like Google to find local businesses. And, when searching for a local business on a mobile device, 88% of consumers will either call or visit within 24 hours.

Common geomarketing strategies

Common geomarketing efforts include:

• Organic local search marketing, including local listings and local landing pages

• Paid local search marketing, including bidding on relevant keywords in a specific area

• Location-based advertising, including ads on third-party websites

• Local social media (especially as publishers like Google include social media posts on listings)

• Website personalization

• Email marketing, segmented by geographical location

A location-based marketing strategy helps brands deliver the right message at the right time to the right audience. This can increase brand awareness, website and foot traffic, and sales.

Geomarketing can be very effective. In the first year after Denny's switched from another solution to Yext Pages, the brand saw a 100% increase in local page impressions. (Yext Pages are proven to be continuously optimized, so their performance improves over time. In fact, two years after launching Yext Pages, impressions on Denny's local pages had increased 174% from their original level.)

And these targeted marketing campaigns bring benefits offsite, too. More people see your listings than your webpages — in fact, listings receive 2.7x more views than websites. And because local searchers typically have high intent to purchase, it pays to attract these customers.

Since launching with Yext, Denny's has driven over 73 million clicks to its listings and experiences 36% year-over-year growth in clicks on these listings. (You can read more about Denny's partnership with Yext to increase local discoverability here.)

Key tactics in a successful organic geomarketing strategy are:

• Complete your listings as comprehensively as possible for up to 62% more clicks

• Create search engine-optimized, local landing pages

• Monitor and respond to the reviews left for each of your locations

• Post on your local social media pages frequently

But watch out for these common pitfalls:

• Duplicate listings, which can cause confusion among customers. (To resolve this, you'll need to suppress any duplicate listings.)

• Landing pages without structured data, or landing pages that load slowly

• Customer reviews left unmonitored and/or unresponded to

• Social media pages with outdated or incorrect information (like location and phone number)

Brands must cut through the noise with a powerful digital presence at a local level to make meaningful connections with local customers. Geomarketing is a powerful strategy, but you also need powerful tools. Yext is the leader in multi-location digital presence management, with solutions for everything from listings management to search engine-optimized webpages and beyond. Explore the Yext Digital Presence Management platform today.