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How to Win Sales With Location-Based Advertising

Wilson Lau

Sr. SEO Marketing Manager @ AdRoll

Imagine you lead the marketing efforts for a growing coffee shop with several locations in the San Diego area. Despite consistently promoting the business, you notice that the Ocean Beach location is seeing a noticeable drop in foot traffic. You’re worried potential customers might be visiting more established competitors, such as the conveniently located Starbucks within the nearby Target. 

But fear not! You’ve stumbled across this blog and will soon discover a strategy to stop losing potential customers to competitors and encourage more local purchases: location-based advertising.

The Basics of Location-Based Advertising

According to Statista research, the number of mobile users worldwide is projected to reach 7.49 billion in 2025, presenting a significant opportunity for advertisers to target consumers based on their location. Location-based advertising utilizes location data to target customers near specific points of interest, such as restaurants, stores, or events in the area. 

This type of advertising is popular due to its ability to deliver targeted messaging that enhances brand awareness and fosters relationships with both existing and potential customers. Its efficiency in budget optimization, increasing foot traffic, providing relevant advertisements, and creating better user experiences are additional reasons why advertisers are drawn to this tactic.

Identifying Your Target Audience

The first step you can take to effectively identify your target audience is to profile them. Are they the highly-driven businesswoman who recently became a partner at their law firm, or are they the recently married couple who just bought their first home? Understand their demographics, such as age, education, gender, income, location, marital status, occupation, and hobbies. For location-based retargeting, you will want to tailor your messaging to these different types of audiences. Another innovative way to identify your target audience for location-based retargeting is to look at who your competitors are targeting with their messaging.

Consider leveraging geographics to pinpoint where your audience is located by reviewing your website analytics. This data can also reveal where visitors are coming from, what pages they visited, and what actions they took while on your website. You can start by determining whether they're located in the United States or internationally. By doing so, you can customize your messaging to resonate with your audience. Understanding where your customers spend most of their time online, such as Instagram or LinkedIn, will enhance your location-based retargeting efforts.

Optimize your location-based retargeting efforts further by examining sales data for patterns and determining which products or services are most popular. You can also leverage market research tactics such as surveys, focus groups, or customer interviews to gain insight into their purchasing behavior. Gather data for location-based retargeting using various tools, from social media analytics to Google Trends. 

Crafting Personalized Ad Content

Location-based targeting helps you identify a more granular audience, which enables better ad personalization. Targeting by country, city, or region lets you create opportunities for ads specific to that geo.

Then, to win customers over, improve search term relevance, landing page experiences, and bid strength to increase their chances of winning as you run the campaign.

You can start enhancing the previously mentioned components by customizing your landing page. This is the first page a potential customer will land on after clicking your advertisement. Personalizing your landing page will increase the chances of having a strong first impression on potential customers who click on your ad. 

Let’s go over several helpful tips for creating dynamic, personalized advertisements. 

  • First, leverage data mindfully without being overbearing or too reliant on personal data. Keep this step in mind when establishing customer personas. Ensure your customer's data is safe and used to their advantage, showing them intriguing and relevant content. 

  • Next, create a diagram mapping out the content that’s most relevant to your audience. By doing so, you’ll be able to address their pain points effectively. The top of the chart should focus on attracting customers to your company website, leading down to the conversion point.

Using Geofencing and Proximity Marketing

Let’s explore the different types of location-based advertising methods by beginning with proximity marketing. 

Proximity marketing

According to Market Research Future, this market is projected to reach $360.5 billion by 2030! Proximity marketing leverages location technology to reach customers via mobile devices, serving them engaging advertisements. This method is popular because it gives advertisers a comprehensive understanding of customers' needs, wants, and behavior patterns. 

Location-based retargeting

Another location-based retargeting and targeting method is geofencing. This is a type of proximity marketing, connecting advertisers with customers using powerful GPS technology to send highly targeted advertisements based on a customer's location. Geofencing allows advertisers to select areas to fence and place and virtual parameters around. These areas range from neighborhoods, parks, malls, and competing companies, to locations customers spend the most time at. When a prospect enters the virtual fence, the technology identifies them as individuals who would benefit from receiving the advertisements, which are then displayed on their mobile devices. These advertisements would appear on apps and websites customers frequently engage with, such as retail, weather, culinary, and sports. 

Integrating Location-Based Ads With Other Marketing Strategies

Integrating location-based advertisements with other marketing channels, such as social media and email, offers numerous benefits, including reaching more individuals through a multi-channel approach and ensuring engaging messaging across all platforms. This approach enables advertisers to reach customers on their preferred channel, providing direct links for optimizing conversions. A multi-channel approach allows advertisers to take advantage of all the channels' different benefits.  

Consistency is key

It’s important to ensure your multi-channel approach has consistent messaging. This helps build customer trust and increase brand awareness. Ensuring consistent messaging also helps your brand have a cohesive identity, increasing the chances of customers recognizing your advertisements and relating to them. Location-based retargeting becomes more effective as customers become familiar with your messaging across various channels. 

Ready to Implement Location-Based Marketing Strategies?

We understand that consumer privacy can be a concern when it comes to location-based advertising. Many companies are hesitant to implement location-based marketing into their campaigns because they’re worried about infringing on their customers’ privacy. At AdRoll, we prioritize privacy-focused marketing strategies and strongly believe in finding the right balance between respecting customer’s privacy and providing relevant content. 

AdRoll streamlines the process of managing location-based advertising initiatives. Our platform helps prospective customers become aware of and visit your business. AdRoll strategically takes care of all the details of your marketing campaigns, including designing compelling advertisements. We'll also monitor and analyze the results to let you know which advertisements are high-performing and which ones are not. 

Click here to learn more about our audience and segmentation tools!

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