With the increased push for social marketing in the last year came a growing emphasis on hyper-local marketing. Hyper-local is all about greater interactivity with consumers and a heightened personalization of the user web experience. As Marc Brownstein of Advertising Age puts it, "What Groupon began is having ripple effects on marketing plans throughout America. Clients want their marketing to be increasingly hyper-local, meaning that the advertising should feel organic to the community it is placed in."
Hyper-local niche marketing hasn't just served as a buzzword in the industry, this tactic has brought tangible results for many marketers. In 2011, the advantages of this tactic became more obvious than ever before - a geotargeted campaign drives 7 to 10 times more user engagement than content with a more generalized focus, according to ClickZ.com.
As you start to roll out your marketing, consider the following strategies for identifying a niche audience and speaking to consumers on a neighborhood level.
Seeking novel audience targeting methods
Marketers seeking to incorporate a hyper-local technique into their campaigns might start with traditional behavioral methods, but there are limitations to cookie and pixel-based tracking that limit the effectiveness of hyper-local campaigns. Many users opt out of OBA, and cookies tend to expire on their own after 30 to 60 days. This makes 60 percent of the online population unreachable to advertisers who can't rely on the fact that the remaining 40 percent are qualified targets. Semcasting's MARKETmatrix can provide a solution to this problem because it doesn’t rely on cookies and pixels at all. MARKETmatrix evaluates online visitors based on their IP addresses and 750 key location-based psychographic and demographic data points that are tied to hyper-local vectors. The publicly available data is mapped into "value clusters" through predictive modeling to form IP Zoness at the sub zip-code level. Targeting hyper-local campaigns is now up to 77 times more precise than zip code level targeting with near 100 percent coverage of online visitors.
Offering daily deals
As Brownstein pointed out, much of interest in hyper-local was brought about by the availability of competitive daily deals from local establishments through venues like Groupon. While localizing a campaign can have informational and social benefits, nothing attracts an online user's attention like putting a lucrative discount in front of the right audience. You can take a thoughtful approach to the kinds of deals you offer (and who you advertise them to) by using the information you glean through solutions like MARKETmatrix. MARKETmatrix can group users together based on all kinds of identifying factors like affluence, life stage, political values and more, giving you greater assurance that you're not wasting valuable ad spend on unlikely prospects, while also giving you additional information to target the deal itself.
Trying a multi-channel approach
Users who engage with localized campaigns are also likely to be more engaged in multiple online platforms including Email, Facebook, and web sites. It's well-substantiated that multi-channel campaigns create higher lift. Beyond merely advertising to consumers on the basis of their local associations, consider timing your messaging with an email newsletter coupled with Facebook and display advertising to sites and locations which align with hyper-local content.