Location-based marketing
Meet your customers, wherever they are.
What is location-based marketing?
Location-based marketing does what it says on the tin. It’s a ‘sooper dooper’ way of marketing your business to people who are in a particular location. And that location can be as small as three square meters!
Instead of showing a generic ad to anyone on the internet, you use privacy-compliant anonymised location data (from GPS, Wi-Fi, or cellular networks) to show specific messages to people who are near or inside a particular area.
For example:
- A law firm could target the office parks or specific buildings of their competitors
- A local cafe could target everyone who goes through a nearby train station on a Monday morning between 7-9am as they arrive for work
- A business consultancy could target a conference venue, capturing the audience and serving ads to them for 2 weeks after the event
Why is location-based marketing so 'sooper'?
It stops budget waste
Location-based marketing means you only show your ads to the people that matter, so you don’t waste time and money on the wrong audience. It’s ‘sooper’ focussed and targeted, meaning your budget can go much further!
It gets better engagement
Hyper-focused advertising that reaches your audience at precisely the right time leads to much better engagement rates - and yes, that means better ROI!
It helps you increase market share
Location data lets you target your competitor’s customers. By drawing a virtual boundary around a rival business, you can serve ads or exclusive discounts to shoppers the moment they enter the venue.
It gives you clear attribution
With location-based marketing you can see exactly what has worked and what hasn’t - and optimize your campaigns as you go. No guessing here!
The passive audience
Location-based marketing works by reaching passive audiences - those people who might not be actively looking but who might buy if they know about you. At any given time, only 5% of your potential customers are ‘in-market’ (IE: searching and ready to buy). The other 95% are your passive audience.
By the time someone searches for you or your products online, they are already at the end of their journey. They know they have a problem and they’re looking for the right solution. They probably have a fairly good idea of what they’re looking for, so hopefully they’ll land on your website.
But if you only advertise to the 5% who are currently searching, you’re likely missing out on the other 95%.
“Soop has really led the charge… they’ve helped us gain a good digital advertising foothold and put us prominently in front of the people we need to speak to” Tom Gleave, Knauf Insulation.
How location-based marketing works
- Build your audience - where do the people you want to target physically go? We’ll draw a virtual ‘fence’ around these locations, ready to build an audience of everyone who enters that area.
- Target - target this audience with digital ads that your audience see both online and offline. Some of our favourite ways to do this are:
- Paid search - grab active searchers by appearing at the top of search engines
- Paid social - pop up in your audiences’ social media feeds
- Digital out of home advertising - advertise on digital billboards within your target area
- Retargeting - capture people who have already visited your website
- Contextual - advertise on websites where the content is relevant to your audience
- Digital radio, TV, podcasts - be seen and heard on the shows your audience is interacting with
- Optimize - digital advertising lets you instantly see which ads, keywords and messages are working and which aren’t, so you can optimize as you go and get the most out of every pound
Location-based marketing in practice
"We've got good relationships with builders merchants' head offices, but how do we get our message to their clients?
“For us, it’s not necessarily about getting a sale in that exact moment. It's about becoming more familiar to the audience.
"This is particularly vital given the long sales cycle in construction; an architect may specify a product today for a job that won’t break ground for two years. We need to stay front-of-mind throughout that entire journey.
“The relationship with Soop has become a real partnership rather than someone just doing something for someone else. We will always help out and do things in a joint way which means that, honestly, it's just smooth sailing. The Soop team has been really on the ball and come back to us in record speed!”
Tom Gleave, Customer Marketing and Communications Manager, Knauf Insultaion.
