Blasting your marketing message to as many people as possible was once a widely used tactic.
But not cost-effective for small businesses with smaller budgets.
The whole idea behind mass marketing is to cast a wide net and hopefully catch a few fish. These days, however, the opposite is true. The more you can focus your message toward a specific segment of people, the more effective your marketing becomes, and the more return you get on your advertising investment. Think of it as fishing in a lake where you know the fish are rather than the ocean.
This marketing type is the underlying principle behind hyper-focused local marketing (sometimes shortened to hyper-local marketing). By concentrating your efforts in specific local areas where your target audience lives, works, or plays, you’ll speak more directly to the people who want and need your product or services, and you’ll generate more sales as a result.
Where localized marketing used to involve targeting a specific town or zip code, modern tools now allow marketers to get too detailed in their efforts, targeting specific streets, pinpointed locations, and even particular households, ethnic groups, and demographics. A successful hyper-focused local marketing strategy typically involves using multiple methods at the local level, including tactics like:
- Optimizing your online presence to show up in localized web searches or “____ near me”
- Conducting deep research to learn the habits and interests of your target market at the local level
- Using technologies like geofencing and IP tracking to trigger strategic localized ads at the right times and places
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This localized approach can go a long way toward getting you the results you’re looking for. Let’s look at four key advantages to adopting a hyper-focused local marketing strategy.
1. Easier to Measure Results
When you limit your marketing campaign to specific people within a particular area, it’s easier to gauge the metrics and identify success—to see what worked, what didn’t work, and make tweaks and refinements. You can also perform A/B testing at this level by trying different ads in similar locations and comparing their performance.
2. Easier to Replicate Success
If your localized marketing approach works in one place, it will work in another. Even within the same city, different neighborhoods may respond to different stimuli, but the basic concepts of localized marketing will work the same way. As you master the localized approach, you can scale your efforts to other local areas where you do business.
3. Easier to Build Customer Loyalty
When you supplement your local targeting with locally relevant content (e.g., blogs, videos, and social media), you establish yourself as a local authority within your vertical. You also gain trust from your prospective customers because they believe you understand where they are coming from.
4. Easier to Establish a Niche
By understanding your customers’ needs at the hyper-local level, you can easily position yourself as the only provider of that particular product/service in your area. Establishing yourself in a niche market can dramatically increase demand for what you offer, since you’re the only place people can get it.
At Wicked Bionic, we know how to make hyper-focused local marketing work to your advantage and deliver the best returns on your investment. Talk to us to discuss creative ways to integrate a more localized approach into your marketing plan.
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About the Author
Dana C. Arnett, Founder and CEO of Wicked Bionic, spent 30 years in the entertainment business before starting the agency in 2015. Los Angeles-based multicultural communications and advertising agency works with government and private sector clients on strategic marketing and engaging media campaigns. Dana has always loved learning from other cultures, and that curiosity became the foundation for Wicked Bionic’ approach to culturally responsive marketing – building authentic connections between organizations and the communities they serve.
