school size: 750 students
By Matthew Guay
At this point in the 21st century, geotargeting is not a groundbreaking form of communication: being able to use location data to reach users with messaging appropriate to their locality and behavior. With the birth of social media, utilizing user data to further target them has been given a bad wrap, but it isn’t inherently evil by design.
One thing to consider is that geotargeting is much more cost-effective than it perceives to be, which creates more value for small businesses in turn. Customers are also more likely to have brands geotarget them more due to them experiencing a more tailored user experience.
Geotargeting can be accomplished in many technical forms such as geo-fencing, zip code IDs, GPS signals, and many more. In use, geotargeting can successfully hide ads from competitors, helps personalize content, creates a healthy marketing budget, and makes regional and seasonal communications easier.
It’s the user’s needs that are important to think about when utilizing geotargeting, relevant content can be communicated in real-time so they can be retained as a future customer. This is also a great way to initiate the perfect relationship with your customers to help growth, additionally, and it can be accomplished ethically that benefits both a business of any size while still creating value for the customer.
Geotargeting Case Study
Geo radius targeting is a good example of how powerful geotargeting can be as a strategy because it makes it efficient in communicating with a smaller local clientele; which is perfect for small businesses!
Domino’s Pizza was able to benefit greatly from this strategy with a simple email and text messaging campaign. Instead of using marketing dollars to extend their reach to potential new customers, they stayed true to the 80/20 rule and focused on their best customers.
The campaign was simple: offer customers within a range of each location 'Order Now' coupons that instantly placed an order for pizza for the user, all that was required is the user’s email or cell phone number to allow for more convenient ordering in the future. This helped Domino’s create a better relationship with their current customers that all divulged that information to them.
Geotargeting helped save their customers time and always for better data management on Dominos end. It also allowed the pizza giant to successfully record more product conversions (pizza orders) while focusing on a more efficient reach and healthier business practices.
Here's a quick video of the marketing and analytics team at Dominos talking about the gains from geotargeting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcpNISufOPQ
The Power Of IP
Utilizing Internet Protocol (IP) addresses was how Dominos utilized this strategy through geofencing. An IP address is simply a digital return address similar to a residential address.
Each time you connect to the internet, you actually do it indirectly; the only network legitimately connected to the World Wide Web is the one generated by the internet provider. A great way to think about IP addresses is that they are by no means permanent. Each time you move locations, thus connecting to a different network, you’re given a new tracking address; you’re probably on a different internet provider’s network, and they don’t exactly coordinate amongst themselves to keep your IP address consistent. Even a simple hard reboot can sometimes mean a new IP address assignment for your computer.
If you're still confused on IP addresses, check out this great video from the GeoFli team!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=5&v=c67Ag60H_EA&feature=emb_title
Don't Fall Victim to a Data Silo
One of the biggest money wasters in today's modern tech world is unutilized data. Any size business is capable of generating large volumes of data at any given time with any given project. Furthermore, that same data can very quickly become overwhelming and hard to communicate.
Stored data that is not being utilized but has the potential to create value is often called siloed data, referring to grain silos where this unutilized data is stored in a data silo.
Data silos have the potential to harm business operations and analytics associated with making strategic plans. Limitations are incurred which makes communication difficult internally within a business and externally with customers; it creates unhealthy data which can look like incomplete data sets, inconsistent data, duplicate data, weaker collaborations, and irresponsible data management practices.
Data is healthy when it is easy to communicate and it is accessible across the organization. One of the most common forms of data siloing is hard to find content on an organization's website.
We all have experienced it before; digging through a website just to find relevant information to our needs. IT spends hours generating specific web pages just to only have the content underutilized due to lack of communication and weak SEO results. Its marketing dollars at waste and irresponsible use of resources, as well. This is where geotargeting helps and more specifically, GeoFli.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDmqfYD9SI4
Geotargeting is an opportunity for you to personalize your web content, including images, texts, and call to action buttons to better relate to online users. Visitors will feel they’ve been given a site experience that’s more tailored to them as an individual- GeoFli is a software that utilizes IP address targeting to change web-based content based on location.
This tailored experience drives conversions, retention, and increases the likelihood that communication efforts are delivered to the correct individual. The best part about geotargeting with GeoFli is that it is not IT-dependent; anyone in a business can be trained to strategically place unique content on a webpage to have it reach different audiences the same way Dominos utilized radius fencing.
