In a perfect marketing world, every advertiser would have unlimited marketing budgets and would be able to afford to advertise and reach everyone. However, since we live in the real world, we know advertising budgets are not unlimited.

Decisions are made each and every day about where to spend dollars to most effectively target your customers. With an increased emphasis on marketing ROI and getting the most bang for your advertising buck, geographical targeting is becoming more important in the marketing and advertising world. This article focuses on a new way to evaluate your target audience through geographical targeting: What is it? How does it relate to ROI? “Where” should you advertise? In what direction is geographical targeting headed? Empower has always believed that every media plan begins with an advertiser’s target audience. Our position is that an in-depth understanding of your top prospects goes beyond who they are, but also includes where they are.

What Is Geographical Targeting?
Geographical targeting puts a targeted advertising message in front of a specific segment of the target audience within a defined area. Geographical targeting is a challenge every marketer faces. If you’ve ever wondered “how do I reach my best prospects” or “how do I decide the best markets for my advertising dollars,” then you’ve at least considered geographical targeting at one point in time.

Geographical targeting best answers the “where” question and is most commonly used to prioritize and select markets in which you advertise.

What Can Geographic Targeting Do For Me
Geographical targeting can improve marketing ROI. If you narrow your target audience and focus on those prospects with the greatest potential of becoming customers, you can convert more consumers to your brand. When the focus is placed on high potential consumers, the likelihood of converting them to the brand is much higher than with consumers who are not part of your target market. This in turn lowers the cost per new customer acquired. Geographical targeting is cost effective because it allows the advertiser to reach its best prospective customers and allows marketing dollars to work harder.

The key to geographical targeting is understanding the target consumer. Once the target consumer is well-defined, it becomes easier to find consumers with similar demographics. Geographical targeting allows you to narrow down the consumers you reach within a specific area to find consumers with whom your message best resonates.

Where Are My Best Markets?
Sales results, growth opportunities, competition within a given market– these are all important things to take into consideration when deciding where to advertise. The process of deciding which markets to support with marketing dollars can be a daunting one. Fortunately, Empower has a tool that takes away the guess work and prioritizes markets based on each advertiser’s needs.

Market Advantage Prioritization Systems (MAPS(sm)) is a proprietary tool that determines the optimum markets with the highest ROI potential. MAPS(sm) can best be described as a turbo-charged market evaluation system that is completely customizable by advertiser. The tool analyzes product/brand/retail sales, product/category growth, competitive environment, media costs by market, plus any other measures important to that advertiser’s business. Markets are assigned a MAPS(sm) score which prioritizes the advertiser’s most important markets. This tool has the ability to determine costs of TV and radio plans and allocate media budgets according to the MAPS(sm) score. It is designed to put the advertiser in a better position to determine where to spend its marketing dollars to obtain the greatest return on investment.

Both local and national advertisers can reap the benefits from MAPS(sm). As most national advertisers know, national media does not provide equal coverage in all markets. Empower has applied MAPS(sm) for national clients to prioritize markets that receive supplemental local media, therefore balancing out the coverage of the national media plan. Always on the lookout for new ways to utilize this creative tool, Empower used MAPS(sm) for Check ‘n Go in a revolutionary way: pushing our media vendors to adjust national schedules to deliver minimum thresholds in our top priority markets. MAPS(sm) has something to offer to every advertiser.

The Future of Geographical Targeting
The need for advertisers to be in front of mobile customers is becoming a necessary ingredient to geographical targeting strategies. The impact advertisers can have on a consumer by serving them geo-targeted ads while they are on the move can lead to immediate sales, especially for retailers. More and more consumers are turning to their phones for information on products and services when they are mobile. Targeting consumers with a geo-targeted ad while they are surfing their Internet-enabled device, or being listed in a consumer’s search query when they are looking for a restaurant or place to shop can lead to sales. Many people are by-passing calling 411, saving the $1.50 and searching from their iPhones instead, or they are texting the word Pizza to “GOOGL” (46645) in order to find the closest slice of pizza. The iPhone has brought these options to the masses and consumer adoption will only continue to grow. Empower’s client, Stanley Steemer, is utilizing local mobile marketing strategies through partners such as Google, weather.com and CNN.com.

Summary
There are many different facets to geographical targeting. Reaching consumers with the greatest potential of becoming a customer becomes easier through geographical targeting. Understanding where the best customers are located can help marketers focus advertising dollars to improve the likelihood of paying out the marketing investment, thus improving ROI.

As marketing challenges continue to rise, geographical targeting can improve media efficiencies and drive new customers to the brand. Empower continues to stay on the forefront of new and improved ways to reach our client’s target audience. Geographical targeting is yet another strategy we can employ to maximize our client’s marketing ROI, and fortunately it is much easier to implement than a search for a perfect world.