Are You Geotargeting Your Marketing Efforts Effectively? Why it Matters

by Contributing Author

Marketing generates sales – at least it should if you’re doing it well. Marketing also costs money, no matter how you go about it. Focussing on your demographic, including their physical location, helps you to deliver targeted initiatives that convert interested consumers into customers. But are you really targeting the right areas? Here’s how to get your geotargeting just right and why it’s so important.

Geotargeting: How Companies Know Where Their Best Customers Are

Mapping software changes the business of crunching sales data to find sales hotspots into a simple matter. If you’ve never heard of a “heatmap,” it may be time to find out how to use location-based software to your advantage. There are multiple reasons why this information is worth its weight in gold. Let’s look at a few of them.

Making the Most of your Marketing Investment

On the face of it, delivering marketing messages across the widest possible audience means more exposure and better sales. However, covering a countrywide or even statewide area means additional costs. That’s why marketers use demographics to know who their customers are and where to find them. The “where” is one of the clues that makes a difference to the cost of customer acquisition.

Avoiding or Confronting Hard-to-Beat Competition

Every business has its competitors, and if yours is going up against a local hero, you’ll need to be very focused to win over their clients. While you might have plans to go head-to-head with your competitors later on, you might find it more economical to begin winning over customers in geographical areas where the competition is less fierce.

However, if you’re aware of increasing sales despite competition that you previously found daunting, maybe it’s time to ratchet up your efforts and grab more market share.

Guiding Your Strategy

Your heatmaps will show you where people are less interested in supporting your business. Your next step before making a concerted effort to win over that market is to find out why. Armed with this information, you can make decisions about your strategy.

Do you need to adapt your message, for example? If there’s little or no perceived need for what you have to offer, can you change that perception? Would you need to adapt your products to appeal to that market, or is it simply not an area you’ll prioritize for now?

Deploying Your Staff

Despite the rise in remote buying and selling, there are still advantages to personal contact, and in the B2B space, this frequently means sending out reps to increase engagement with existing customers and to search for new ones.

Planning their route to achieve maximum returns in exchange for the costs of a sales trip means joining the dots between places that are already showing potential as geographical areas in which you have existing clients and the potential of gaining new ones. Before you put your resources on the road, as it were, set them up for a better chance of success through geotargeting.

Cold calling? Thinking of opening up a new branch? Trying to target digital marketing more effectively? The same applies.

Where, Who, How, When: Geotargeting has Clues

Markets don’t always behave as we think they ought to. Knowing where to market, who you’re marketing to, and the best times to pitch will matter. You may even alter the “how” depending on location-specific information. Geotargeting is an extremely effective approach to sales and marketing that makes companies consider these questions based on complex data sets. And if that sounds like a headache, there’s software that presents it in an at-a-glance map” no pain, and plenty to gain!