How to Build and Activate Location-Based Audiences?

The digital advertising industry and SEO agencies have seen a major shift over the last few years. Advertisers constantly look for new ways to reach their target audience, while publishers struggle to monetize their inventory and maintain user experience. With the rapid growth of mobile devices, location-based data is one of the most valuable assets for businesses to engage with their customers severally and increase ROI.

Location-based targeting! What’s it all about?

Location-based targeting is contextual advertising that allows a Digital marketing company to target users based on their location, usually within a radius. The power to use your audiences’ location helps you gain insights into your customer bases and deliver more relevant ads. That way, you can reach people at the right time and place, which can boost sales and increase your brand awareness. The technology behind this type of targeting has evolved and is now being used by countless SEO and digital marketing agencies to reach customers more effectively.
This stratagem is great for businesses like restaurants, malls, coffee shops, and bars that want to target and engage potential customers within walking distance of their stores. With over 2 billion monthly active users worldwide, Facebook is by far the biggest social media network, offering location-based targeting options for SEO advertisers and digital marketing companies.

Step-by-Step Process to Build and Activate Location-Based Audience

Location-based advertising is the future of digital marketing. In fact, it’s undebatably the most potent tool in any digital marketing and SEO agency’s arsenal. As a marketer, if you are not leveraging location in your marketing campaigns, you are missing out on a fantastic opportunity. This guide will help you build and use the location-targeting settings to engage and zone in on people who’ve recently been interested in or searched for your targeted location.

1. Create a List of Locations

The first step is to collect all relevant locations for your business and create a custom audience based on people’s physical locations with their consent. This can be done in two methods: manually, by adding each area you have, or automatically, by using Google Maps API. Your SEO agency can map your store locations or collect them from sources like Google My Business (GMB). GMB has a “Geo Tagging” feature, which allows you to add multiple locations to your business profile. Using remarketing data and lists for search ads (RLSA) or custom audiences from Google services like Google Ads, Google Analytics, and DoubleClick also comes in handy.

You will also want to use a tool like Facebook Pixel, Google Analytics code, or another tracking pixel to track people’s behavior and actions on your site. Doing so will give you a clearer picture of what individuals do when they visit your site and how often.

2. Build a Lookalike Audience

Another way to generate a location-based audience is by setting up a lookalike audience. This type of audience is based on an existing customer list and shares similar attributes to the customers who have already used your app or converted. So, it’ll include all the usual demographics, behaviors, and past purchases within your existing customer lists. Instead of targeting this list directly, Facebook or AdWords Editor finds people similar to those who’ve already taken action on your site and adds them to your new list.

3. Form Segments Based on Location

Customer segmentations allow you to target people who have visited your locations or live in certain areas. To say you run an internet marketing company and want to advertise to people who’ve used your services or visited your places in the past week. You can create a segment for each agency location to target the relevant groups and include them in an ad group. This will allow you to serve ads only to people who have visited you recently — but not necessarily to everyone in the geographic area where your company is located.

4. Define and Manage Audience Attributions

Now that you have an audience, it’s time to set up an ad campaign with those people in mind. When creating a campaign for location-based audiences, there are various attributes you can use. The two most common types of attributions include time (i.e., how long someone has spent in your store) and distance (i.e., how far someone lives from your store). You can define these attributions when creating an audience inside Facebook Ads Manager or Google Ad Editor by clicking on “Advanced Options.” Once you’ve marked off your audience, you can use it for your ads by choosing “Use existing” under “Ad targeting.” You can also edit or add audiences directly from the ad creation tool.

5. Come Up with Personalized Ad Messages & Creatives

After you’ve defined a location-based audience, you can create a message or creative variations that are personalized based on that location. Depending on where you want to place your ads, these can be used in your app or website. So, make sure that the message is relevant to the person who’s seeing it! It’s also imperative to add relevant keywords or categories that describe what people do at those locations (for instance, “SEO agency,” “internet marketing company,” or “digital marketer.”

In addition, you must select the right bidding strategy for each audience segment, considering how much they’ll spend on your products and their likelihood of converting into customers.

6. Launch Your Audience Campaign

Now that you have all the pieces in place, it’s time to activate and launch your location-based advertising campaign and measure. Start by making a list of all the places and events where you want to advertise. Since location-based advertising is most effective when people are physically near your business, schedule the campaign to run during peak hours at each location. You can also set up rules for Geo-fences and radius around zones. To monitor the performance of your ad campaigns, you can collect data from multiple sources like Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, and other third-party tracking platforms. Your digital marketing agency can optimize your campaigns based on real-world results based on what works and what doesn’t. This gives you more confidence in the future as well as better ROI on your ad spend!

Final Verdict

There’s no denying that location-based targeting is an easy, tactical way to reach an audience you are confident will be interested in your ad! Not only will it greatly increase your ads’ effectiveness, but it will also enable you to connect with people in a way that no other approach can. But remember that you need to keep your finger on the pulse of consumer behavior and trends to target your audience effectively.

Looking for a professional internet marketing company in Manchester and affordable SEO services in Manchester to build powerful websites or grow your profits by targeting location-based audiences? If so, Autus Digital can help you succeed in today’s fast-paced marketplace. To talk to our marketing specialist, call (+44) 7912-029617!