From SEO to GEO: Why Marketers Need to Jump on the Geolocation Bandwagon

There has been so much buzz in the industry around location, with location-based apps, services and targeting coming to the forefront of the conversation. But why is it essential to have location integrated into a campaign? Location-based ads are imperative to a successful campaign as 80 percent of purchases are made within a 14-minute drive from a consumer’s home. Essentially, “where” is the most important signal on the Internet, after “search” that is.

During my 25+ years as a global brand marketer at P&G, Coca-Cola and as Samsung’s CMO N.A., I’ve witnessed marketing, advertising and consumer engagement approaches transform from ‘push’ to ‘pull’, especially in the past few years with rapidly changing digital tools and consumer empowerment. During the pre-digital years, I saw it all — local printed directories, zip code and segmented direct mail, billboards — any means possible to reach an exact demographic and target audience. The common thread within those offline strategies was location. While these engagement tools still have their purpose, the question today is how to reach your targeted audiences locally online where and when they want to be engaged, especially with rapidly growing mobile platforms, through sophisticated technologies available today. Another pain point is the need to measure results and increase MROI versus traditional targeting tools.

Currently, online advertising has no scalable way to reach consumers at the most granular level, beyond their location (state, city, zip code). As a result, poorly targeted online ads lead to lost revenue with lackluster conversion numbers. But, we are slowly getting one step closer to the conversion numbers of direct mail, billboards and TV ads through technologies like IP geolocation, a key ingredient in the location ecosystem.
The latest IP geolocation data can tell marketers if a user is logging on to the Internet from a home or a business and what type of business. Finally, B2C and B2B brand marketers are able to more effectively deliver display ads to the right people. This means that you can target students while they’re checking their e-mail on campus. Not interested in marketing on campus? How about insurance, banking, lodging, dining, government, recreation, advertising or telecommunication? Now you can reach these audiences from your keyboard.

Here are some benefits to localization:

• Increases customer engagement with more relevant messaging.
• Increases offline or online traffic, conversion and sales by automatically personalizing merchandise assortments by location.
• Powers local search and discovery via IP geolocation.
• Localizing content is the key theme that will resonate with retailers.
• Localizing product-related content (e.g. local imagery/video) and promotional content (e.g. personalized ads and offers) are a priority for businesses.

The ability to geotarget ads is undoubtedly a game-changer. IP targeting is a win-win for everybody: consumers see ads that are actually relevant to them — while maintaining privacy — and advertisers no longer have to guess who’s looking at their ads.

By Steven Cook, former Samsung Electronics SVP, CMO, North America; former P&G and Coca-Cola global brand marketer, and CMO Council Advisory Board Member