Hey, Josh here from the InternetBeacon. The InternetBeacon is an Internet Marketing firm located in Maryland. Our primary focus, SEO, is a subcategory of Internet Marketing. Similar to traditional advertising, SEO is all about getting your Brand out there. In this case, we´re working to get your website in front of customers through search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. For more quick, useful information, check out our SEO Answers page, our SEO Glossary, and our blog posts on SEO.
A huge part of advertising, especially if you are a small business, is getting the local demographic. Sure you can market to “The Internet”, but that is a large-scale endeavor. A great strategy is to start locally, then move global. To do this, you can explore a form of marketing called “Geo Marketing”, which I will refer to as GM.
GM allows for you to tailor your content and marketing push in order to reach your local market first. There are several ways to accomplish GM effectively. First, you can use software in conjunction with your web server.
The two big uses are gathering data and reacting to that data. As far as gathering data, you can use special software to gather the IP address of the visitors to your site. An IP address is unique to a location, like a ZIP code. Some of them can be more specific than others, but you will still walk away with the general area of the people visiting your site the most. This is very useful information, especially where the next part of GM is concerned, using the data.
First, you can use this data to see how well certain markets are responding to your marketing. If you have been putting up billboards in Town A and there is an increasing amount of traffic from there, you know that they are working. However, if Town B is showing a lot of interest without any advertisements in their area, you will have cause to do more research. Second, you can tailor your content to your audience. Sites like FedEx use data like this to help serve you a site that is fitted to your nation.
All in all, Geo Marketing can be a powerful tool for businesses looking to expand on the Web. Start local and see how far you get. The rest of the world will always be there, but getting a good following locally means word-of-mouth growth, which doesn’t cost you anything.
-Josh
Tags: Data, Geo Marketing, Internet Marketing, IP Address, seo
