06 Nov 4 Strategies to Increase Local Awareness
If you have a brick and mortar location, social/local awareness is a hot topic of conversation. Many marketers are asking themselves: how do we get more personalized and relevant content in front of people who are near one of my locations? It can be a laborious process to create enough unique content per location, but in this post we will take a look at 4 ways to increase awareness of your brand on a local level.
Tag Local Pages
The first way to easily increase awareness at a local level is by tagging local pages (assuming you have them), in content when it is relevant. The initial channel that comes to mind for this is Facebook, as many brands with individual retail locations have claimed their local pages. However, don’t forget about other channels like Twitter and Instagram. Additionally, have partners and sponsors of events happening at individual locations tag these pages as well.
Geo-target Content from National Brand Page
If you don’t have local social pages, another way to deliver specific content is to geo-target posts from your national brand page. If you are going to post a lot of this geo-specific content, I would recommend dark posts. However, testing some local posts on the national page could be a good way of giving a shout-out to individual locations. If you are geo-targeting from the national page, you can target down to the specific city level. Adding some paid media behind these geo-targeted posts can help combat the more narrow reach.
Run Facebook Local Awareness Ads
If you have some paid media budget to leverage, I would suggest running Local Awareness ads on Facebook. Local Awareness ads target people when they are near your business or live in a selected area. However, in order to run these types of ads you have to have local pages set-up on Facebook. The radius for these ads are established based on the address on the local pages. The ads have a variety of strong CTA’s: Get Directions, Call Now, Learn More or Send Message. I recommend doing a trial with key locations and switching up the CTA’s to see which ones drive the most action.
Test Beacons
Out of all the tactics, testing beacons would be the biggest investment, but could also be the most rewarding. Beacons are still in their early adoption phase for a lot of retailers. Before implementing beacons, I would do a thorough evaluation of your target audience (specifically, their device usage in-store), and the technology and training investment needed. As always, I think a small test would make sense to start with a few locations. In the past, you would need to have your own brand app with location functionality to utilize beacons. New technology, like Yext Xone beacon network, leverages existing location-based apps (i.e. MapQuest), eliminating the need for stand-alone brand apps for beacons. Beacons provide a variety of interesting opportunities to reach and gather data from customers in-store. A few of those include: delivering tips or coupons, looking at foot-traffic patterns and repeat visit attribution, and offline to online re-engagement matching and connecting users to your social channels.
What are your plans to drive awareness on a local level for your business?
