Local Audience Targeting

Targeting a local audience means more than simply advertising to a specific geographic area. It means using all the tools at a marketer's disposal to reach local individuals who are most likely to purchase a product or service and to ensure that these same individuals come into contact (or close to coming into contact) with the brand on a near-daily basis. For some, and for many of the examples I'm about to share, local audience targeting is done via physical locations—stores, offices, co-working spaces, and so on.

And for these companies, the digital ad could very well be the last touchpoint before the customer enters the front door. That's using social in a 'nearby' sense and in a way that's more immediate than previously possible, thanks to some of the advances in geolocation and GPS tracking that have occurred on smartphones in particular over the past decade. From a convertibility standpoint, this is what makes location-based audience targeting so powerful, especially for small businesses, companies with a regional focus, and those that use physical locales as part of their overall business model.