In 2022, the marketing segment dominated the global industry in location intelligence applications, accounting for over 20 percent of the overall revenue.
This figure underscores the cutting-edge benefits of location intelligence in upscaling sales and marketing campaigns and predicting outcomes.
Location intelligence involves visualizing and analyzing geospatial data. Marketers and business owners use this technology to understand where their campaigns perform best, analyze why some promotions don’t work in certain areas, and plan strategies to refine and realign campaigns.
Geocoding is one of the approaches under location intelligence. What is this, and how can you leverage this method to create targeted public relations campaigns?
Image by GeoJango Maps on Unsplash
Understanding geocoding
Geocoding is a geographic information system (GIS) spatial analysis subset. Unlike geolocation, which focuses on finding a device’s physical location, geocoding converts a place’s name or address into latitude and longitude geocodes.
These coordinates represent any location, whether it’s a park, a street address, or a geographic feature like a mountain. They help provide accurate views of places.
Geocoding and marketing
The application of geocoding in marketing is called geo-marketing. The potential advantages of this strategy include the ability to:
- Create comprehensive profiles of clients
- Identify locations of potential customers with similar profiles to your existing ones
- Determine the marketing potential of a particular area
- Publish online advertisements based on user locations
- Tailor products and offers to a local area
- Geographic segmentation for exclusive offers
- Make sure your web hosting service has data centers in the geo-location where your target audience is placed
- Analyze consumer activities and patterns in an area
- Enhance virtual call center and email marketing performance
- Target existing customers with advertisements whenever they’re in your company’s vicinity
- Ensure the local relevance of advertisements
- Publish content at specific time frames
- Learn the active number of website users from various regions
- Acquire real-time client opinions about your brand
- Identify and analyze competitors’ locations
- Showcase website content relevant to visitors’ locations
- Determine location-specific content topics
Image taken from smarty.com
How to leverage geocoding for targeted public relations
Public relations is an intricate and distinct part of marketing. It thrives on creative persuasion and compelling message dissemination. Rather than selling your products, you build your company’s overall image and reputation, aiming to foster a positive public perception.
PR also establishes how your company communicates with people—partners, customers, politicians, journalists, and the general public. You must be an expert storyteller to put your stories out there, particularly on trusted media outlets and publishers.
Here’s how you can develop authentic and compelling PR strategies through geocoding:
Understand your target audience
Jumping on strategies you find during research can be tempting. However, you must first identify your goals—one of which is understanding your target audience.
With geocoding, you can map out your audience’s demographics in different areas, such as age, income, and education level. This detailed analysis allows you to tailor PR campaigns that resonate with their needs, interests, and local nuances.
You can also combine the geocoded demographic data with consumer behavior insights. This combination lets you identify and analyze consumers’ online activities and media consumption based on their geographic locations. At the same time, it helps you outline the key messages you want to communicate to your target audience.
Create geo-targeted PR content
With the location-pinpointing ability of geocoding’s application programming interface (API), you can create geo-targeted content that speaks and resonates deeply with various communities. This approach involves tailoring your messages to address local interests, concerns, and cultural nuances.
Some content types you can enhance with geocoding are press mentions, informational interviews, features, and podcasts.
Major mapping service providers like Radar offer a geocoding API. This tool enables technical teams to convert addresses into geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) and vice versa. This capability is essential for tailoring PR campaigns to specific geographical areas, ensuring that the content is relevant and resonant with local audiences.
Moreover, it helps you foster cultural sensitivity to ensure your geo-targeted content respects a locale’s cultural norms, cultivating a brand image that values diversity and inclusion.
Identify the best locations for events
Event planning and management are other areas that greatly benefit from strategic geocoding. You can find a venue that maximizes attendance by identifying and analyzing your target audience’s geographic distribution.
Additionally, you can use the geocodes to determine which areas have access to public transport, making the event more accessible. This careful selection can impact the success of your events.
You can also leverage geocoding to create geo-targeted advertising campaigns—like localized social media ads—specifically directing the promotions to potential attendees to increase visibility and awareness.
You can even engage with local media outlets, such as radio stations, regional newspapers, and television networks, to promote your events and reach more niche audiences.
Monitor brand mentions and publish localized responses for crisis management
Crisis management is crucial in public relations. Integrating geocoding is pivotal because it enables you to monitor real-time brand mentions from UGC creators, local customers, influencers, media outlets, and other publishers.
As such, you can identify emerging negative sentiments before they escalate. This approach enables you to address issues and mitigate reputation damage proactively.
When addressing issues, responses play a significant role in showing your understanding of the situation. Thanks to geocoding, you can tailor your statements and press releases like how you tailor geo-targeted promotional content.
This approach involves empathy for the affected communities, acknowledging mistakes, and providing localized support, information, and assistance. Such thoughtful responses help reinforce your commitment to your stakeholders to rebuild trust and confidence.
Expand media network and relations
Local media promotions are more complex than requesting outlets to promote your content. You must establish relationships and expand your network to ensure coverage.
With geocoding, you can find trusted media sources, bloggers, influencers, and journalists in specific areas. You can advertise your brand and the benefits you can bring to these outlets through outreach. They also provide opportunities to amplify your campaigns on communication channels where your target audiences regularly engage.
Complementing your local PR campaigns with content that appeals to these publishers and creators is ideal.
Your press releases must reflect the local interests and vocabulary to make them more compelling and increase the likelihood of coverage. This way, the local media anticipates every content you’ll publish.
Utilize advanced technologies
Combining geocoding with other advanced technologies like vpn services, geofencing,artificial intelligence (AI) and localization management tools, such as Centus, is another way to leverage its marketing power.
- Geofencing – This technology creates virtual boundaries that trigger actions when devices enter or exit these predefined areas. For instance, users receive targeted push notifications about events or press releases when they cross these boundaries. Besides capitalizing on consumers’ proximity, it personalizes their experience with your brand.
- AI – Since AI algorithms process and analyze vast amounts of data, this helps interpret geocoded data to enhance the precision and adaptability of your PR campaigns. It enables you to use advanced predictive analytics to forecast local trends, media consumption and behavior, and online activities.
- VPN services – VPNs enhance marketing strategies by securing data exchanges and allowing marketers to simulate different geographic locations. This encryption and location spoofing, such as that offered by Android VPN services, enable secure, targeted geocoding and geofencing campaigns, ensuring privacy and expanding reach without physical presence, crucial for global campaign adaptability and consumer trust
Track the performance of your PR campaigns
Like other marketing tactics, measuring geo-targeted PR campaigns is essential. You must track your geocoded metrics, such as media coverage, engagement rates, and event attendance, to comprehensively understand how your efforts are performing in various regions.
This comprehensive analysis helps you identify which locations require a different approach to make your campaigns more effective. It involves readjusting content creation and distribution and the tone of messaging to concentrate your tactics on areas where you’re most likely to yield positive results.
Ultimately, performance tracking isn’t just for analyzing effectiveness—it also contributes to the continuous improvement of your overall marketing and advertising strategies.
Elevate your PR campaigns with geocoding
The future of PR is inevitably linked with the innovative use of contemporary technologies like geocoding, which can help you stand out in saturated markets.
Geocoding empowers PR professionals like you to craft campaigns that deeply resonate with local communities, norms, and vernacular. With strategic utilization, you can open your company to new heights of engagement that nurture long-term public trust, confidence, and authority.
