To grow and remain competitive, businesses of any size must adapt their marketing strategies in the face of changing online consumer behavior. The volume of products, services, information, news, and other online searches are increasingly rapidly, and consumers are researching the locals more often than they search anywhere else.
In marketing and internet marketing, geo targeting is the method of determining the location of a website's visitors and delivering different content to visitors gathered from collected information from various methods.
Geo targeting, often referred to as “location targeting”, is an active response to geolocation. Geo targeting allows people to run different campaigns in different locations. Ads might be served all over the world and vary in their marketing message according to the segment and audience that they approach. This will open a wide range of possibilities to target a marketing or advertising campaign at a limited set of visitors based on their physical location.
There are various of methods that can be used to geo target visitors. Visitors volunteer their geolocation information via site registration, online purchasing information, and other methods of submitting their location information. If the visitor does not voluntarily divulge their geoinformation, then the visitor's geographical location can be determined through information gathered: country, region/state, city, metro code/zip code, organization, IP address, ISP, WiFi/GPS data and so forth. A common usage of geo targeting is for online advertising.
Geo targeting is useful when an online presence is used to promote an offline business. If a business wants to drive local customers, the business can limit its campaign to only be shown to people who are within the radius of several miles by using geo targeting. Google AdWords can integrate the business' locally targeted ads into the Google Maps service, making it even easier for its your customers to find it.
Localization can be used with geo targeting is to show different versions ads to different audiences. For example, a business in Jakarta, Indonesia could promote their affordable delivery service in the West Java geo targeted campaign, while emphasizing the fast delivery time in the East Java campaign. Geo targeting can also be used for delivering different content to visitors from different places.
On the internet, geo targeting can help small businesses to compete with national brands and can ensure that large corporations effectively make use of their advertising resources. Geo-targeting is an important tool for local small businesses that wants to run focused, cost-effective campaigns. Geographically targeted ads can increase returns significantly over "blind advertising."
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is becoming a well-known tactic for driving targeted online traffic. Websites with the geo targeting ability is one of the best methods a company/business/organization can have to drive more traffic to its website and convert more searchers and wandering visitors into customers. Google and other search engines place a high amount of importance on the keywords that appear in domain names in determining where a website shows in search results. Although a website with the geo targeting ability is just that a website with a capability to identify its visitors location, its capability surpasses any other methods in approaching targeted visitors by looking at its efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Since the introduction of geo targeting and global page management, marketers have the ability to deliver targeted contents to visitors based on their location and language. In addition, this allows brands to aggregate their visitors and content under a single URL which reduces a clutter of pages that would otherwise be presented using other methods. Whereas brands in the past used multiple pages for different languages and locales, now a unified presence can push relevant content to specific audiences around the world. This has many benefits for businesses, including cost savings and a unified brand identity.
As the use of mobile devices increase exponentially, Geo targeted mobile advertising is becoming a hot commodity and a great way for marketers to not only drive in-store traffic, but make ads relevant to consumers pushed to their devices automatically.