You post on Facebook that you’ll be at AT&T from 11 to 1 today. The first comment is from Jessica who says “When will you be in my town? I want to see you guys but that’s thirty minutes away.”
Both Google AdWords and Facebook use location targeting to target company ads to specific locations.
Your station can do the same using your loyal listener club database.
Imagine emailing Jessica for the next remote, concert or event in her town with an email targeted to her (and other listeners who live in that area). You create exposure for your event or remote, plus you sound local when you call out small segments of your market by name. You aren’t just the market’s station, you are that town or suburb’s station, too.
The opportunities location targeting provides advertisers go beyond email alerts for nearby remotes. You can create a special offer based on your advertisers’ needs. Email special offers or grand opening alerts to listeners who live nearby the advertiser’s location.
If your client wants to compete with a business in another area of the market, email special offers to listeners who live near their competitor. Maybe your client has locations all over the market, but wants to promote a different product or message in certain areas. Location targeting will allow you to serve these needs.
If you have a franchise owner who is hesitant to buy digital because he doesn’t want to give free advertising to other franchise owners in your market, promote location targeting as a way to reach his location’s customers, not all customers of the franchise chain.
Kim Willoughby, Senior Consultant at The Center For Sales Strategy, says “tailoring a special offer to the particular target was essential in creating many successful campaigns.” She describes a digital campaign that involved advergaming:
“For a local jeweler, an email was targeted to specific zip codes, linking to a landing page that hosted an interactive game. As a reward for completing the game, listeners received a special offer good for a limited time. The store owner said it was the best radio campaign he had ever done. It also happened to be the first time he had purchased digital with a local radio station.”
Kim’s example also provides you with one more metric to measure success. You now have the email statistics (open count, clickthroughs, and bouncebacks) plus traffic statistics (page views, unique visitors, etc. ) for the advergaming page on your website.
Many database systems are sophisticated enough to do most of the work for you, segmenting your database using the information you plug in (city or zip code). For those that aren’t, you can organize your database manually by creating lists for each zip code in your market.