What Are Geo Leads? The New Way to Market Your Business

Author: Lisa Cords Category: Marketing, Social Media & Digital Date: December 27, 2022

Business owners and marketing professionals are always trying to get ahead – to find the latest and most effective way of connecting with their audiences and making a sale. A customer’s location has always been an important aspect of their buying habits, and its importance has only increased with the prevalence of mobile device use. Utilizing geo leads has become a popular tactic to capitalize on this information. But what are they, and how do you use them?

Geo Leads: Geotargeting vs. Geofencing

In the world of geo leads, or sales leads generated based on a customer’s geography, there are a lot of approaches and it’s easy to get confused. One of the most often misunderstood is geofencing vs. geotargeting. So, let’s start with some clarification.

What is geotargeting marketing?

This is a tactic used to market to a target audience who meet defined demographic criteria and are in a specific geographic area. This means not everyone in your targeted area will see your geotargeted display ads. How does geotargeting work? Tools that capture geo leads allow you to define a specific location, then show your marketing only to those who meet your criteria when they are in that location, based on their geo tracking, meaning their GPS (global positioning) or IP (internet protocol) address. Geotargeting can be used in conjunction with approaches like geotagging marketing, adding tags to content on your website to make it appear when consumers use the internet in your designated area, or with geo retargeting which allows you to show customers an ad after they have visited an assigned location.

Benefits of a geotargeting marketing strategy:

Leveraging geo leads for geotargeting offers many advantages including:

• It provides you with improved data and analytics to better understand your audience.
• It allows you to personalize your outreach to connect with that audience more effectively.
• Customized outreach bolsters customer engagement and loyalty.
• Geotargeting enables you to hide your ads from your competitors.

What is geofencing advertising?

How geofencing marketing works is by targeting everyone in a geographic area. Geofencing targeting uses geo leads to draw a figurative fence around a market. Geofencing marketing tends to utilize a tight radius around a neighborhood, your business location, or even your competitors’ location. Using geofencing for marketing means that once your geo lead enters your fence, they will see your geofencing ads if they google something on their phone or spot your geofencing outreach when they search social media.

Benefits of a geofencing marketing strategy

The purpose of geofencing has many advantages including:

• It allows you to target customers based on their location in real time. Is your store offering a special discount? Use a google geofencing ad to let potential buyers know when they are close by. Own a restaurant? A geofencing display ad can bring your business to their attention when they search for nearby lunch spots. You can even use geofencing advertising around a competitor’s location.
• Want to increase foot or web traffic around a particular time? Your geofencing campaign can activate during that period to help with your website geofencing.
• Your geo leads can give you a wealth of data to learn more about your customers and how your marketing with geofencing is working.
• Geofencing advertising is highly cost effective.

Best Practices for Programmatic Geofencing and Geotargeting

No matter which route you choose, geotargeting or geofencing ad targeting, here are some tips to help you. Consider it a bit of geotargeting or geofencing for dummies.

• Choose your geographic location carefully. The designated area for geofencing for your small business should be a small radius, as little as a five-minute travel distance, so you want to make sure you designate wisely to ensure your efforts like geofencing google ads don’t miss the mark. With geotargeting, your radius will likely be larger, but you still want to make sure none of your efforts are wasted outside of your strategic geographic area.
• Know your audience. No matter how large your target audience is, your outreach will be more effective if you understand who you are reaching out to.
• Include a strong call to action. Both your geotargeting and digital fencing marketing must include a specific call to action to be effective.
• Review your efforts regularly. You can’t know if your geotargeting or geofencing marketing with google is working if you don’t monitor your data and analytics routinely.

Geo leads provide a wealth of information on your potential and current customers, and knowledge is the first step in developing a successful marketing strategy. Whether you are looking to try tactics like geofencing with SEO or geofencing with google ads, none of it will be effective without a thoughtful strategy. And that’s where we come in. We can help develop a marketing message strategy that identifies who you are, your differentiators, and your value propositions – and communicate it in such a way that will resonate with your audience, and clearly set you apart from your competition. Please contact us today to get started.