Hyperlocal Marketing: How to Attract Local Customers

For many years, local businesses have remained in the shadows compared to global businesses in terms of advertising investment. Indeed, it is much harder to find products or services offline on Google than online. Google is well aware of this, and recently there have been trends that the search engine is starting to correct the unfair ratio of attention between global and local businesses: campaigns targeting local audiences are getting higher priority, the functionality of displaying ads on Google Maps is becoming more convenient, and the number of precise targeting tools is growing. In this ADV Advantage blog post, we’ll explain how hyperlocal marketing can take your business’s revenue to the next level.

Local marketing with the prefix “hyper”: what is it?

Hyperlocal content marketing is a strategy for creating and distributing content targeted at a very narrow geographic audience, such as a specific neighborhood, city, or even a single street. A set of actions to implement this strategy involves a significant expansion of the reach of the target audience, which is already ready for conversions, because it needs certain goods or services and has the opportunity to visit your establishment on its own.

The main steps to implement local marketing

• Add location keywords to titles, meta descriptions, and headings.
• Developing location-specific landing pages to improve visibility among local users.
• Listing your business on Google My Business and maintaining up-to-date information, such as contact information and business hours.
• Collaboration with local influencers.

Examples include queries such as “coffee shop in Chicago” or “coffee shop near me”. The Google Ads system will match the location of potential customers and the targeting settings of your advertising campaign to provide customers with the most accurate results.

Benefits of advertising on Google Maps for business: How to set up

For hyperlocal PPC advertising, it doesn’t matter what kind of local business you choose. Any product or service that can be purchased offline can be advertised online to convert existing and new audiences into your business’s own audience. For the existing audience, you should apply a remarketing strategy, while for guests of the city or district, you should choose separate advertising creatives aimed at familiarizing them with local businesses.

Content features for hyperlocal marketing

To dominate the local market, you need to prioritize the creation of personalized content.

Use the following ways to promote your business:

• Collaborate with influential people who live in the chosen region. It can be various kinds of collaborations, giveaways, sponsored reviews, interviews, etc.
• Publish blogs describing interesting topics: these can be text posts on your website or social media, videos demonstrating products or services, analytics, research, or humor.
• Encourage users to create their own content related to your business.
• Offer personalized promotions specifically for local customers.
• Speak to the audience in the language of visuals that best influences the understanding of engagement.

Key aspects of content for local businesses
Sponsored content is not just about demonstrating that your business exists. This advertising should be useful, namely:

• it should solve the problems of the audience and emphasize the ways to solve them, of course, with the help of your services or products.
• should demonstrate real positive feedback from interaction with local businesses.
• should highlight the results of interaction with other brands that have a global status and a high level of reputation

By showcasing this kind of content, local businesses have the best chance of succeeding and gaining the trust of local residents who will become loyal fans that will generate the most revenue.

Hyperlocal marketing and PPC

Free promotion platforms and organic SEO brand development are a race against time in a world where results are needed now. Every promotion strategy requires an advertising budget for PPC promotion to immediately reach the largest audience and increase the effectiveness of the content. PPC advertising is a guarantee that your ads will be in the highest positions in search results, so they will never go unnoticed.

The main reasons why PPC is important for local businesses:

• Instant results within an hour after the ad is launched.
• Possibility of detailed targeting by location, age, gender, device, interests, marital status, monthly income, etc.
• Reaching a truly interested audience if the selected keywords and phrases are really relevant to users’ requests.
• Significantly lower advertising costs and lower cost per click compared to a global strategy.
• The ability to interact more accurately with the audience, knowing their traditions, behavior, and other common cultural characteristics.
• As we have already mentioned, Google always gives preference to local advertising, so you can be sure that you will not compete for the audience’s attention with large global brands.

Measuring success in hyperlocal marketing

Engagement metrics for local businesses in online networks are provided by the platforms where the advertisement was placed. Social media success metrics are likes, comments, shares, and favorites, which are the most valuable. Success in PPC advertising is conversions, macro conversions, traffic, interaction with the extension, and the user’s overall path in the sales funnel. Google Ads and Google Analytics are the best for analyzing this data – the latter provides the largest amount of statistics.

Budget size doesn’t matter: how to get the most out of PPC

Finally, don’t forget to measure success with your own offline tools or CRM statistics to track business changes after each ad creative is launched. Local businesses are always limited in budget, so we recommend optimizing your advertising strategy by reading the useful recommendations of ADV Advantage specialists in other articles on the company’s blog.