Published on May 15th, 2019 | by Marquis

Geo-targeting Guide: How to Use Geo-targeting Through Social to Find Your Audience

Social media marketing is the concept of using websites and social media platforms to promote or market a brand or its products. However, a common mistake that marketers should avoid at all cost when starting their marketing campaigns is to try to appeal to everyone on social media.

Trying to appeal to everyone will cost your company time and resources. And you are almost guaranteed that the results will be anything but impressive. To increase the chances of success for your brand, it is advisable that marketers define their target audience so that they can focus their efforts on them. By knowing your target audience, you are able to tailor your products and services to meet their needs in the fastest way possible.

However, though it may seem a bit difficult for brands to market their products to the intended audience, once marketers understand what needs to be done, the process becomes much easier. Below are simple steps that marketers can take to do geo-targeting through social media to find their target audience:

Social Media Polls

Social networking platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook are effective ways social media marketers can use to survey their target audience. Popularly referred to as social media polls, these surveys can give companies incredible insights into their customers. And using social media platforms, it is easier for marketers to engage and interact with their customers so that they can better understand their needs and how to meet them.

Social media polls come with analytical tools to provide you with information about your customers including their age group, preferences, professions, and locations.

Exclude Locations Where Your Target Audience Will Not Be

One of the advantages of social media marketing is that, not only can you reach your target audience in specific locations, you can also exclude certain locations that you don’t want your brand to reach. Excluding locations where your target audience will not be can be done by the venue, perhaps one side of a city or street, or an area that you had targeted earlier.

For instance, businesses in the shopping malls that might want to target nearby university students can exclude the target locations of the universities perhaps during school breaks, when students are away from school.

When you exclude locations, your marketing strategies will be more cost effective, eventually saving resources that would have been used to target high demand areas. As Digital marketing agency explains, the low cost, broad location marketing ad campaigns will help your brand accomplish high targeting goals, build more traffic and increase sales.

Get specific with Geo-Targeting

When running an ad campaign, be it on Facebook or any other social networking channel, social media marketers should always understand the importance of targeting customers in a specific geographical location.

Most brands and marketers, however, don’t factor in on certain specific areas where their consumers may frequent, outside their usual locations including their travel destinations, where they reside or the places they usually socialize. So next time you are running a social media the campaign, don’t neglect to target these locations.

Analyze Consumer Behavior And Preference From Past Locations Visited

Location history of customers provides marketers with a vast amount of information specific to a certain person. Where do they like to shop, what do they like to buy the most, how often do they go shopping, and which means do they use to get there. With this information, marketers obtain great insights to help them target customers, deliver relevant content and responsive location ads campaigns.

For example, a clothing shop in Paris, France might give discount coupons to anyone who has visited Paris and its neighboring cities at least more than once. The customer might be anywhere in France, but based on their location history, the clothing shop can only target those people who are in Paris and its environments.

Analyze Current customers

To make the best out of social media marketing, you need to analyze your customers. In order to do this, you need to first, understand the market and the customers who are buying your products and services.

Ask yourself these questions: Where do your customers live? How old are they? Can you describe their average income? What are some of their interests? Is your audience mostly male or female?. Follow this by asking yourself which method are you using to reach them. Do your customers come from social media channels? If yes, among all your social networking channels, which platforms are getting more attention from your customers?.

Analyzing your current customer’s help marketers direct their efforts and resources towards the right target markets, reduce time wastage and maximize sales.

Create a Custom Audience

In social media marketing, an effective way to create a custom audience is to target users who at one point have interacted or come across your content. These are followers on your social channels who have watched your videos liked a post you published or even left a comment on your profile.

By grouping these followers into different types of audiences, based on previous interactions with your brand on social media, you can focus on a particular group of people based on their specific interests in your product or service.

Tags: audience, geo-targeting, guide, how to, social, social media

About the Author

Marquis Marquis is a writer, social media manager and SEO content marketer. She currently lives on the coast of Ecuador, working remotely as a freelancer. Her primary focus is on building online visibility of new, up and coming brand, particularly brands that promote health and wellness. She lives a nomadic lifestyle, though is originally from California.