Your prospects’ location is one of the most influential factors to consider when getting an online campaign started. Whether you’re using SEO to get noticed in your market’s search results or GeoFencing to send Display Advertisements to specific streets or neighborhoods, there’s a lot to think about before casting your digital net…
Consider Proximity
A practical course of action is to first dominate your local market. Using online marketing tools to hit the cities, townships, boroughs, and nearby neighborhoods around you is a smart idea for a few reasons. If you travel to your clients, a local customer base allows you to save money on gas, spend less time in traffic, and have more opportunities to build up your local customer base. If your clients travel to you, your services just gained the competitive advantage of being convenient. Customers tend to view companies more favorably when they know the business is local, so using online marketing to get noticed can pay dividends.
Consider Areas with Demand for High-Level Jobs
When thinking about the locations you want to go after online, factor in the price point of the service you want to provide. If one of your company’s goals is to offer higher-priced or larger-scale services, you should target areas that are more likely to meet you at that price point.
Maybe you’re a landscaper looking to book more full-scale property maintenance jobs or a garage door company aiming to install more custom models from fashionable manufacturers. With GeoFencing, you can create advertisements that showcase these premium services and send them to specific neighborhoods ‘ or even streets! Your standard-priced services can be your bread and butter but consider targeting affluent areas to ramp up your upscale offerings.
Consider the Age of Your Target Areas and Their Developments
Someone who works within home services understands better than anyone how the age of a house can determine its needs. When drafting up a marketing plan, the age of the homes within the desired area must be considered. An older neighborhood in need of consistent repairs and maintenance will provide more opportunities to focus on repair and maintenance services. On the flip side, your company may be of more help for newer developments where homes have been freshly constructed. New developments equal new tenants. New tenants mean potential customers who are looking for a go-to landscaper or dog groomer in their new area.
At either end of the spectrum, you can refine your online marketing strategies accordingly. You can cater your SEO campaign to go after ‘repair’ or ‘maintenance’ terms in older areas, just like you can go after ‘installation’ terms in newer neighborhoods. With Display Ad marketing, you can choose to highlight your emergency service to the streets with older houses and opt to showcase examples of your work for new developments.
Consider Your Competition
The last item to note before directing your online marketing efforts to a specific city, town, or neighborhood is your existing competition. You should have a good knowledge of what they are doing before you make any big decisions or allocate any of your marketing resources. Your competition may have substantially more equipment and/or higher budgets at their disposal; in which case you probably should not try to outspend in the areas they service.It may benefit you to look for areas that are NOT noticing your competitor(s). This can highlight an untapped market that’s ripe for the picking. We certainly wouldn’t advise you to make all of your company’s decisions based on what your competitors are doing, but you’ll save yourself some headaches by giving them some thought.
Starting up or restructuring an online strategy can feel like a daunting task. But when you make sure to touch all your bases before moving forward with a campaign, you feel more assured in your marketing efforts and are able to spend more time on the other facets of your business. It’s important to note that targeting the right location is just one piece of the online marketing puzzle; to find out more about effectively executing an online campaign, call Market Hardware!
