It’s not every day that you get to see how your work can impact the way people enjoy their lives, but on a recent trip with some friends, I got a firsthand look at why we all need online advertising. Our trip was to Indianapolis to watch the New York Jets play the Indianapolis Colts. After a long drive, my friends and I finally made it to the city and enjoyed the game. It wasn’t until the game was over that our troubles began.
We didn’t have a place to stay for the night and the long drive home didn’t sound like the greatest idea. We figured it would be pretty easy to find a hotel once we were in the area, but we were wrong. While we were driving through the city, I began searching online for “Hotels in Indianapolis.” I had a few options, but they either didn’t have any openings or when we used Google Maps to find the hotel it wasn’t where their address said it was online.
I was disappointed to find out that many of the local hotels were missing out on customers like me because they weren’t taking advantage of the online advertising technology to reach their audience. Because of my adventure, trying to find a hotel in Indianapolis, I want to outline some of the tactics that businesses can use to target customers based on their location.
Three Location Base Advertising Tactics
There are quite a few digital marketing tools any business can use to make sure they maximize their profits and not let potential customers not slip through the cracks.
Geotargeting
With Geotargeting, businesses can run Display Advertising or Search Engine Marketing (SEM) within a specific geography to serve ads to people when they need your serves the most.
While I was searching for a hotel, I could have been served an ad during the search process if they were to bid on keywords when I was in their specific geography by using SEM. If I would have searched for “Hotels in Indianapolis” anywhere within the boundaries of Indianapolis that they set, I would have been served an ad that would have helped guide me to their hotel.
When trying to capture new customers, a business would have had the best chance to capture my business if they would have been using an advertising tactic like Geotargeting.
Remarketing
Remarketing is a way to position ads in front of an audience who have already visited your ad, but might not have purchased anything right away. After using Geofencing or Geotargeting to get me to their website, it would’ve been a great opportunity for the advertiser to use Remarketing and continue the conversation with me. While searching for a room on a competitor’s website, I would’ve been served an ad that would entice me to return to the previous website that I visited.
SEM the Location Extensions
A hotel can benefit from both organic marketing tactics and SEM by reaching out to customers as they look for hotels. An optimized paid search campaign with location extensions produce higher click through rates and better overall performance.
By adding these extensions to their paid search campaign, advertisers can help ensure that their establishment provides relevant information when a customer searches for their business. It will also help eliminate the problem that my friends and I had of actually finding the location of the business by providing a verified location on their Google Plus page.
Looking forward
After searching and searching, we decided to just get a room at the next hotel that we drove past. It wasn’t in the location that we wanted so we had to travel quite a bit to get to the game. The price wasn’t in the price range we originally thought we would end up paying as we ended up paying a little extra. The quality of the room wasn’t what I thought it would be from the reviews on the website either. As a result of all of this, we ended up heading back home after the game was over.
With the use of location targeting and a great marketing strategy, the hotels in the area could have captured me when I was in the search process looking for their establishments. Today’s advertising technology creates a competitive environment for businesses in the same industry. The businesses that end up on are the ones who search for their customers instead of waiting for their customers to find them.
Are your customers looking for you? Start and online advertising campaign today and capture new customers when they’re looking for you. If you want to learn more about Remarketing and how you can reach more customers, download our free whitepaper below.