Mobile Marketing: What is Geo-Targeting?

Mobile marketing is an increasingly popular choice when it comes to Internet marketing, and geo-targeting is a major part of it.

With the proliferation of mobile online searches, the concept of mobile marketing is becoming an increasingly popular option for marketers. One of the main facets of mobile marketing is the ability to geo-target potential clients based on their location.

Here, we aim to explain what exactly geo-targeting is and how you can leverage this powerful feature in your mobile marketing efforts.

Geo-Targeting Defined

In order to understand how we can use geo-targeting in our mobile marketing campaigns, we must first understand what it is. As the name might suggest, geo-targeting has to do with marketing to a client base in a given location. This can be as broad as a country, or as specific as an IP address. How you decide to use the feature depends largely on what you are trying to accomplish.

In the most basic sense, geo-targeting is the automated process of determining the location of a visitor to your website (be it on a desktop or mobile device) and showing different content to that visitor based on certain geographic criteria (e.g. country, region, city, IP address, etc.). This is a powerful tool when it comes to online advertising, as it allows businesses to promote different campaigns to targeted demographics based on where their searches are taking place.

With regards to mobile marketing, there are many more versatile capabilities when it comes to geo-targeting.

Geo-Targeting in Mobile Marketing

The ability to target individuals on their mobile device using geo-targeting services opens up a world of potential clients that businesses may not have even known about. Granted, geo-targeting leads on a desktop is a viable technique, but these users may not be near your area, or may not be willing to venture out and find you. On a mobile device, however, individuals can be targeted in a location as narrowly defined as a one block radius.

Take Foursquare, for example. Using the business application for Foursquare, businesses can claim their location, create a promotion or special, and the app automatically geo-targets users in the vicinity of the store, restaurant or business. There are also new and upcoming mobile marketing PPC abilities that are more geared towards marketing to users using banners. This trend is on the rise with the increased access to the mobile web by smartphone users.

Geo-targeting can be as simple as creating a special on Foursquare and letting the application take care of the rest, or as in-depth as developing a PPC campaign and custom banner ads and mobile landing pages that drive traffic from a mobile clientele. Either way, mobile marketing is made all the more intriguing by the ability to geo-target users.

Have you done any geo-targeting in your mobile marketing campaigns? How how is worked for you? Tell us in the comments below or on Twitter!