For brand and retail marketers, a considerable amount of time, effort and budget is spent on encouraging consumers to fall in love with emotional messaging, then creating impact in-store at the point of purchase.
But what’s often overlooked is a critical point in the consumer journey, in real-time, when consumers are on the go, making numerous digitally informed, impulse decisions about what to buy and where to buy it.
And this doesn’t mean targeted digital display or even beacon technology, just mobile functionality that will reliably locate the nearest store and provide store hours and customer reviews.
To deliver that, brands have to add value to consumers in the hyperlocal digital world. It all starts with a smart hyperlocal strategy.
On our latest Live With Linkdex webinar, Why Brands & Retailers Need a Hyperlocal Strategy, we were joined by Mike Fantis, Managing Director, DAC Group Europe, and Kiran Prashad, who is President, DAC Group New York & Vice President of Group Operations & New Product Development.
Here are six reasons brands and retailers need a hyperlocal strategy.
1. It’s How Consumers Will Find You
Consumers’ digital and offline worlds are entwined. Both are essential to the consumer journey to purchase, which means brands must put themselves in the right places at the right times.
If people look for your brand, it’s likely they’ll find you. But for more generic searches (such as services), the reality is that if you aren’t optimized, you won’t be found.
2. Users Expect To Find Your Business
Consumers expect relevant, local results. More than just finding your business, they expect to find accurate information (e.g., address, phone number, hours).
So many customers now search for hours of local businesses. It can be quite damaging to a brand’s reputation and bottom line when customers find inaccurate information at a moment they need or want something, or want to go somewhere – this will send them to one of your competitors and they may never give you another look.
3. Mobile Searches are Increasing
Local and mobile go hand-in-hand. Searches are increasingly local-centric.
We’re seeing an explosion of searches that include terms like ‘near me’, ‘closest’, and ‘nearby’ – in fact, ‘near me’ searches have nearly doubled in just the last year. Less users are putting in their location and relying on their phone’s GPS to find the most accurate information.
4. Google Prioritizes Local Search Over Organic
Hyperlocal is a channel with signals you can influence and manage more easily than organic. Visibility, accuracy, strong and consistent citations, and reviews are critical here.
Google uses multiple ranking factors to decide which brands get seen in the local 3‑pack. There are some fairly basic ones that you can easily manage and will help with your relevancy, such as including your city and state in landing page titles.
5. Paid Media Is Becoming More Expensive
Advertisers are more sophisticated. They realize that local searches are further down the conversion funnel and are placing a greater value on local search users.
That means local CPCs are increasing. So if you can get local optimized right, you can reduce your paid spend.
6. It Will Deliver Value & Revenue To Your Business
People are increasingly making critical purchase funnel decisions on the move. The amount of revenue a business without a local presence is leaving on the table remains unknown.
What is known: more than 50 percent of searches lead to store visits within 24 hours. Also, whether it ultimately results in an in-store or online sale, people who visit store locator pages are converting and spending money.
Why Brands & Retailers Need a Hyperlocal Strategy: Full Webinar
Watch the full webinar to find several more great takeaways and insights that will help you develop a winning hyperlocal strategy:
Live with Linkdex Webinar: Why Brands & Retailers Need a Hyperlocal Strategy from Linkdex on Vimeo.