With the dawn of the internet the term globalisation was made extremely apparent to the world, with the ability to sell your products, speak to customers and gain their attention through a whole new means. Doing business ‘globally’ immediately became the ‘in thing’, even more so than before. Many have utilised the benefits of the internet to sell their product or service to customers internationally but a lot less have fully utilised its potential to attract and retain existing and potential customers on a local level.
Web 2.0 has brought about a whole new bag of tricks for businesses to market to their customers and on a geographical level, the bag seems to be never ending. Facebook itself offers two formats for organisations to target their customers locally, through dedicated pages tailored for local businesses or through localised advertising.
Posting pictures, videos from your Youtube channel, relevant content and participating in discussions on your businesses local Facebook page will ideally create an online community for current customers as well as providing them with the opportunity to share your information with their friends and others interested in what you have to offer. Creating an online community, if done correctly, has the ability to create an offline community with online and offline word of mouth. Clubs, bars and restaurants can be a great example of this. Social media is simply all the better to hear you with my dear!
Let’s say for example that a friend of a friend notices that a girl friend that he likes shows up on his personal feed attending a particular event at a local bar x. He then suddenly has the urge to also go to local bar x, however, he is a dilemma, he can’t go by himself! So he posts a link to his friend suggesting the page and next thing you know there are 3 friends going to local bar x purely through the organisation providing and initial fan something of interest to them through social media. This is only one example and as you could understand that different methods of targeting your customers locally through social media for different types of businesses can be quite different. Also note that using knowledge of your customer and targeting directly to your customer on a local level will usually provide the business with immediate results.
Facebook also provides advertisers the ability target their customers almost on an individual level. If you want to target single women, aged 30-35, who are a fan of Oriton handbags and a friend of a fan of your page in the same town as where your business is present – you can… at a cost of course. This ability to direct advertising so closely to your target market means advertisers, particularly online advertisers can now directly target campaigns to the exact individuals who they want to receive the message and can also eliminate unnecessary ad spend.
With a steady increase of mobile users online and the prevalent use of GPS, targeting users by location has also been assisted through the means of geo tagging sites like Foresquare and Gowalla where businesses can provide customers discounts if they login from their premises. More recently Twitter has also introduced geo-tagged tweets where users can also create and share location based tweets. Social media and GPS is simply all the better to see you with my dear!
Whether it’s through Facebook presence or advertising, a short Youtube video or geo-tagged tweets, the ability to reach your target market on a local level through social media is something not to be overlooked. Local Social Media Marketing – All the better to eat you with my dear!
The web is a great step in moving towards treating customers as a target market of one. Especially when you start to look at the kind of things that can be done with personas and websites set up to exploit them.
It will be really cool when location aware tools start to incorporate even more AR.