Hyper-Localization, Your Marketing Home Field Advantage

When you look into your company’s plan for the future, what do you see? Regardless of the industry you’re in, if your answer isn’t Social Big Data and Hyper-Localization, you and your brand are missing out.So, how can a hyper-local brand campaign best serve your business?

Before we delve into the details, let’s discuss what a hyper-localization really is and the impact it will have on our future. Essentially, it is a strategy that allows advertisers to set a distance radius in a local area and target their advertisements to people that are in that specific range. This specificity allows for a whole new level of personalization between the company and the client, which is becoming increasingly essential. We are in a space now where the customer already wants information, coupons, deals and more. The customer of today wants to be affirmed for their commitment and relationship with your brand and they will become increasingly demanding about how they receive this. As a result, there will be a new surge on preferential marketing.

With hyper-localization, we’ll not only be able to deliver more targeted advertisements by location and time, but more specifically by delivery convenience.

We’re already seeing shifts from larger chains that have the means to provide options between mobile apps, SMS, email and social messaging. For example, let’s look at the evolution of Google Glass. There is already infrastructure in place to allow you to be notified if your friends are nearby or if there’s a local restaurant with food you like to eat! In a matter of months, not years, we will be seeing an incredible infusion of hyper-localization and socialization. You do not want to be the company that misses out on this opportunity.

There is a common misconception that only certain industries can benefit or succeed with hyper-localization.

My experience deals primarily with service-based industries such as insurance, mortgage, real estate, financial services and restaurants. With that in mind, I believe that the type of industry is irrelevant as long as the business has a brand identity and is willing to stick with it. Businesses who fail tend to confuse their community by continuously changing their position. To be successful, maintaining a consistent brand message and position is essential, as is creating a community with the intent to foster relationships. Within that community, allowing participation through rewards, recognition, and inclusion of community through both onsite and online events allows them to participate in decisions on what they do. There is also an incredible opportunity to foster collaboration in your community, particularly with those that have online influence and a large social presence. We have a local venue company that manages Chicago venues and we continue to build their business around collaborative relationships with their caterers, bands, DJs, photographers, event planners and other connections. This alignment with their brand and connection to their partners builds a profound trust among their community and among the communities of their partners.

Another area where we are seeing a lot of growth is small businesses using mobile apps and GPS-based location services in order to target people based on content, location and timing. It’s becoming more and more possible for businesses to narrow down their target market from a town or a city to somewhere as specific as a neighborhood or street. This, coupled with Facebook’s recent launch of hyper-local ads, is extremely indicative of the promise of hyper-localization ad campaigns.

The other major component to these innovative strategies is the incorporation of Big Data into your marketing plan. Many companies spend time, energy and billions of dollars in Big Data collection, but never do anything to apply it or use it to it’s full potential. This has been an epidemic and Achilles heel for almost every company that markets. The savior of those people? Social Big Data. Network Science, or the study of the natural order and network building, has established a value and future for this underutilized data. According to a study done by Penn State, “The greatest challenges and opportunities arise from socially-generated big data, observed as a result of human interactions that are increasingly recorded via web, mobile device, distributed sensors, or revealed through the digitization of historical records. Society faces a transformative data deluge, from which new scientific, economic, and social value can be extracted.” That same study later indicates that the economic value of this unexploited data is over one trillion dollars annually. One trillion dollars!

Will you be the company who takes advantage of this phenomenal untapped potential, or will you let the opportunity pass you by?

The success of your company depends on your answer.