There is an avalanche of news lately about geolocation and how when you’re on the Internet we can track approximately where you are and this changes everything for local and national advertisers.
Two recent examples come from Facebook, last week they offered advertisers the opportunity to buy ads limited to certain cities. Now, according to The New York Times Facebook is going to allow users to share their location with their friends and they will allow developers to offer location-based services to Facebook users.
The Internet has come a long way since the days of trying to find Carmen Sandiego on the World Wide Web. Way back then we didn’t have broadband connections so we didn’t know where our site visitors were coming from. Now we do and so does Google, Facebook, Twitter, MSN, Yahoo and every other portal out there.
In the “old days” we only had local TV, radio and newspapers that were geocoded by the strength of their signal or circulation limitations.
It’s time for brand managers to provided digital outputs to local retailers that are loaded with great content, surrounded by appropriate branding, and then enhanced with the local dealers own story and promotion.
Dealer microsites, e-promo pages, local Google landing pages, Facebook fan pages, Facebook ads, banner ad landing pages, the list goes on and on and grows every day.
The best news is that local digital output costs much less to publish than traditional media and our tests prove they have a much better ROI, too.
I’m not advocating that brands stop using traditional media in local markets, only that they move dollars from traditional to digital or risk losing relevance to dealers and consumers.