3 Tips For Customizing Your Ads To Your Local Target

In the last post, we presented the importance of hyperlocal SEM and the reason why big companies would have a tough challenge customizing their ads to their local target.

This is where smaller and local businesses have the advantage as they know more about the location and understand their customers but even them face some challenges.

Below we’ll present a number of tips for all kinds of companies to have in mind, in order to customize their ads to the group of people they are targeting.

• Know the people

It’s extremely important to understand who your ads are aimed at. For example, if you are targeting the group “Owners of small businesses in Lisbon” there’s a need to understand this small group. Learn their difficulties, the problems they go through, what are they looking for, their budget, how can your service/product help them, etc… Learn everything you can about the group, that will help you in the process of customizing the ads.

• Know the local

Different countries have different traditions but the same stands for different cities or regions. It’s important to know the local habits, know what activities people are usually engaged into. If you are advertising in a city where there are no lakes or sea nearby maybe you shouldn’t promote surfing activities, sailing courses or beach towels. Although this sounds absolutely obvious for a local player, it’s surprising how many large-scale campaigns are poorly tailored to the local. Local knowledge plays a key role and it’s really useful. If you want to promote this kind of sea-related activities you will choose another area to do it and save the money you would spend by not taking this knowledge into consideration.

• Local influencers

Using local influencers is extremely important and may give way to outstanding results. These influencers don’t have to be someone who is an expert in a specific area or subject.

Using a specific example from a city in Portugal, one of the most powerful ads ever was an institutional ad with a big image of a man who sells local pastry. Everyone knew him so it caused a huge impact on the people of that city. Having this knowledge comes from interacting with the people and the place where you advertise, which is clearly an advantage hyperlocal businesses have.

Using these 3 tips there’s a higher probability of improving the results you obtain with your advertisements. If you spend some time studying the place and the market you want to target you will be able to shape your ads accordingly.