It’s a common scenario today for brands to have customers in many countries. But, targeting these customers and engaging them is a challenge, owing to their varying preferences and requirements.

This is where geo-targeting steps in…

Targeting customers by location is called Geo-targeting. It’s an important aspect of online marketing especially for brands targeting customers in different geographical locations.

Geo-targeting helps brands address customers using their preferred language and target them with region-specific offers. This increases customers’ brand affinity, engagement and conversions. Google AdWords provides a variety of options and features for geo-targeting.

However, there are certain important factors you need to consider while planning geo-targeting campaigns:

1. Your site’s domain

Some brands have Top Level Domains (TLD) specific to the country they want to provide information for. A ‘.co.uk’ site is specific to the UK and ‘.co.jp’ is specific to Japan. Country specific TLDs make it easy for Google to understand who you are targeting with your information and lets it rank your website appropriately in location specific search results.

However, with a generic TLD like .com or .org, your website may not appear correctly in search results because Google doesn’t know which location you are targeting. If no information has been entered in the Webmaster tools, Google will look at multiple signals like the IP address, location information on your page, links to your page and any other relevant information from Google Places and pick your website’s country domain. These may not yield you the best results. With generic TLDs, it’s best to give Google the requisite information to improve search ranking for specific locations.

2. Choose the right geographical areas

This sounds like a no-brainer, but it’s surprising how often this is missed. Select geographical areas for your campaigns based on your product availability. If your product is available in certain regions of a country, picking those areas will increase the chances of better ad ROI. With Google AdWords, you can achieve precision targeting by postal code targeting.

3. Optimize By Exclusion

Optimize your effectiveness by leaving out areas that are delivering low responses. You can get back to these areas with a revised strategy. After the first run of your campaign, you may notice that your ads have low ROI in certain areas or your products may not have a market in some regions due to geographical factors. You can optimize your ROI by cutting out non-performing areas. Concentrate more on the areas that are generating the highest number of clicks. You can also try bidding less on the areas that have low traction.

4. Include mobile devices

If most of your target audience is on their mobile devices for considerable amounts of time, you should geo-target your mobile audience also. If you are using Google AdWords call extensions and tracing a significant part of your conversions through calls, geo-targeting on mobile devices will be even more beneficial for your business.

People use mobile devices when they are on the go and would be looking for deals that are nearby. Geo-targeting mobile users is highly beneficial because, you can then target them with not only offers in establishments they are close to, you can also roll out geo-specific offers.

5. Use the appropriate languages and currency

Matching your web pages’ language with the main languages of the region is a major aspect of geo targeting that influences traffic and engagement. Provide content in different languages and use a drop down menu that allows users to select the language/region they are accessing the site from. This is an effective way to ensure users can consume content easily. Another way to make your site easy to use is to build it so that it reads the user’s IP address and displays content in the main language of that region.

You also need to focus on the currencies that your site uses to process transactions. Offer the right currency depending on the geographical area the user is browsing from. You can also offer currency options and leave the choice up to customers.

6. Offer coupons and deals

The marketing strategy for each market is different. So, it’s important to sync your offers and deals with the visitor’s geographical area. You can either track users’ IP addresses or you can provide menus for users to select from before providing region-wise offers. Localized offers and deals are more relevant to visitors as they cater to specific market requirements and can therefore help in driving conversions.

7. Run tests

Everything may not go as planned so it’s best to run tests to see if your effectiveness is indeed going up or whether you need to tweak any part of your strategy. Different people react differently to changes, even minor ones and it’s best to use this as an opportunity to improvise further.

Do you have anything to add to this? Let us know in your comments!