You’re sitting at home on your couch, and your favorite pastry shop sends you a text message offering you a discount on your next purchase.
While you might appreciate the gesture, it might not convince you to get in your car and drive there on its own. But what happens next time you’re already around the corner from a nearby location—so close you can practically smell the baked goods—and they greet you with a mobile notification sharing the same discount? Stopping by is a no-brainer then, right?
This is just one of countless examples of the power of geographic data to help marketers anticipate needs and intercept audiences where they already are. Geographic data is a huge competitive advantage, and marketers now have the tools to capture it. But many businesses still have yet to use it to its full potential.
2025 is the year for brands to mature their location-based marketing strategy. If you’re ready to meet your audience where they already are, keep reading. We’ll unpack the ins and outs of geomarketing and how to use it to your advantage.
Locating the value of geomarketing
To market effectively, brands need to know their audience: what they want or need, the influences that shape them, and how they make decisions. That’s why geomarketing matters. Their location (where they live, work, and spend time) contributes to all of those factors. Geomarketing strategically uses an audience’s geographic or location-based data to better target them, send more timely and personalized messaging, or connect via the right channels.
Marketers have been using forms of geomarketing for decades, from placing ads in local newspapers to TV spots with regional stations. But as data collection has gotten more sophisticated, so has marketers’ ability to apply that data to any campaign. Geomarketing has evolved beyond simple, broad-strokes demographics, and in many cases, it allows brands to target individual consumers based on where they live and where they are at a given moment. This spells powerful opportunities to learn about an audience and observe their behavior, then apply that data for higher-performing campaigns.
Geographic data and market segmentation
Savvy marketers segment their audience based on demographic, firmographic, and behavioral information. Geography is one of these factors, and it can play a role in better-defined market segmentation. Geographic data can help marketers understand their audience at a higher level, showing where those most interested in a product or service are located.
The value of geomarketing extends well beyond creating audience segments. It can also help brands build more detailed profiles of an audience in different regions by revealing what content or offers people in different areas are more likely to engage with. Geomarketing can get deeply granular and personal, too, identifying where individuals are traveling and targeting them with marketing designed to convince them to buy in a specific moment. It can also guide strategy, guiding brands to create localized campaigns, rewards programs, or products.
Why you should invest in geomarketing
Marketers have hundreds of audience attributes to choose from when segmenting and sending campaigns. So why is location such a valuable strategy? Geomarketing taps into immediacy and real-time audience behavior. Rather than guessing at where your audience lives or even other businesses where they spend time, you can capture a detailed picture of individuals and your audience as a whole.
Geomarketing now spans multiple technology types to help marketers reach multiple goals, like learning where your most engaged customers live or targeting ads based on someone’s current location.
Location-based marketing is a strategic investment for marketers because it can quickly deliver ROI by improving conversions from your campaigns and reaching customers with the right message at the exact right moment. The more you learn about your audience’s behavior and typical travel patterns, the more you can use that information to drive higher campaign performance. That’s why location-based data pays for itself many times over.
The tech that makes geomarketing possible
No matter your level of sophistication in applying location-based data to your marketing efforts, you need the right tools in your stack to capture it. The current state of marketing tech makes it more accessible than ever to understand where your audience is. Here are some of the capabilities that enable it and tools to make them part of your strategy.
Real-time analytics
Some of today’s marketing tools offer in-depth information about the actions your audience takes and where they take them. As a result, marketers can consider geography as part of their reporting and analytics each time they review campaign performance. For instance, Bitly Analytics lets you review not only short link clicks and QR Code scans over time but also where those clicks and scans happen, down to the city level. This real-time data reveals where your messaging and offerings are resonating most so you can better target campaigns, focus your marketing on certain locations, or even create local offerings for an eager audience.
Geofencing
Imagine being able to serve a consumer an ad for your restaurant when they’re within a few blocks of a location or send them a discount notification when they’re at a business with high affinity to your products. This is what geofencing enables—you can create a virtual boundary around a business location, and send alerts to consumers when they are within that defined area. Platforms with geofencing features can help you power personalized and location-based experiences for more powerful audience retargeting.
AI-powered location insights
When it comes to location-based marketing, AI combines existing analytics capabilities to process more data, observe customer behavior, and predict what they’ll do next. AI-powered location platforms compile multiple types of data from multiple sources to dynamically learn about customer behavior and preferences. Create location-based campaigns that use previous interactions to predict future behavior, guiding highly effective ad targeting, timely offers, and personalized suggestions based on location. AI’s potential to enhance and deepen geomarketing efforts is virtually limitless—with the right data and a plan to reach customers, brands can create more dynamic touchpoints and drive connection and revenue.
Geographic data for marketing campaigns
Geographic data offers major marketing value in the form of likely attributes about them. But you can also use geographic data in highly tactical ways to power specific campaigns. Here are a few examples.
1. Mobile notifications
When a customer downloads your mobile app, you’ve gained a goldmine for loyalty, retention, and connection—if you use it right. Use location-based targeting like geofencing to identify when someone is near one of your brick-and-mortar stores and send them a push notification to encourage them to stop in, share a new menu item, or give a discount. Geographic data can spark perfect timing and encourage a convenient stop.
2. Email
If your audience has told you where they are or you can gather that information from their behavior, you can create targeted and timely email campaigns that will be more relevant and urgent to them. Send an email about an upcoming in-person event or a soon-to-open location. Be sure to include a trackable short link in your email or a landing page with an assortment of ways to connect nearby. As they take further action by opening, clicking, and signing up for other offerings, you can keep learning about their individual preferences and your audience’s interests by region.
3. Digital ads
Geographic data for your campaign analytics helps you make the most of your marketing budget by helping you see where your audience is and invest advertising dollars near them. Let’s say you capture geographic data that shows people in Los Angeles, California, or St. Louis, Missouri, more often engage with your content or express interest in a certain product. You can use those insights to inform your paid ad strategy, spending more to run search or social ads in those regions. Geographic data gives you confidence that you’re investing time and money to reach the right customers.
4. Out-of-home ads
Much like how geographic data informs how you might target your paid ads online, localized data can also guide you to the best placement for a physical advertisement like flyers, billboards, or building displays. Geographic data might tell you the parts of the city where your ideal audience tends to spend time or businesses your customers often visit before or after your location. When you know an audience’s typical behavior, you can intercept them with physical advertising designed to inspire a visit, whether in-person or online.
3 steps to roll out location-based marketing
If you’re currently marketing to customers the same way, no matter where they’re located, or don’t gather their real-time behavior based on geography, you’re missing out on a huge competitive advantage. These three phases will help you map out a plan to start tapping into location-based data for geomarketing your audience can’t help but love.
1. Assess your audience by location
Even if you don’t proactively use geography to inform your marketing strategy, start with your existing tools to see what location data you already have available. From there, you can start to build a more detailed profile of where your best customers are, alongside demographic, behavioral, and other factors.
If you’re not already, turn each of your customer connections—from support outreach to packaging information to social media CTAs—into trackable touchpoints. A tool like Bitly Links shows you audience engagement in real time, along with valuable location data that can inform the timing, messaging, and targeting of your campaigns. Learn everything you can about your audience as a whole, which is the first step to better segmented geomarketing.
2. Shift to geographic segmentation
Once you’ve gathered initial intel on your audience as a whole, you can begin to create more targeted segments by region or even by city. Conduct audience research to learn about how geographic factors can affect customer reach or how seasonal variations affect the business cycles of communities. For instance, tourist-heavy areas may have a busier summer season and lighter winters, while college towns are much quieter when class isn’t in session.
Study your most engaged areas and begin to roll out location-based campaigns via your preferred channels, designed to deepen relationships where your marketing already works and capture attention in less-engaged regions. Gather location-based data from every interaction to inform these campaigns, from daily commuter traffic to repeat weekly purchase patterns, and add more detail to local audience segments over time.
Daily Harvest learned about its regional audience segments by sharing Bitly QR Codes on freezer door clings to drive shopper engagement in grocery stores across the US. The Daily Harvest team saw in real time which locations got higher engagement and where they needed to fine-tune in-store marketing efforts.
3. Personalize customer interactions
Once you’ve mastered your segments, you can adopt more advanced location-based targeting tools. Create geofences around your brick-and-mortar locations to send app notifications or paid ads to those who are nearby. Use GPS and Bluetooth technology to gather more data about how customers behave around your stores, and execute campaigns that predict their next move and encourage them to stop by.
The more you embrace individualized geomarketing, the more important privacy becomes. Always stay transparent with your audience, letting them know that you’re collecting their data and how you will use it—that’s how you maintain trust.
Connect with your audience, anywhere
The modern marketer’s role is to meet potential customers where they are in every moment with a message and an offering they can’t resist. From real-time, user-friendly touchpoints across channels to targeted outreach using location-based data, the best-performing campaigns reach consumers on their terms, learn from their behavior, and get better with every interaction.
Bitly is your partner in capturing audience insights, wherever your customers are in the world, and turning those insights into new conversations, conversations, and long-lasting connections. Our suite of tools lets you create engaging short links, QR Codes, and mobile-friendly landing pages, and capture real-time analytics from each one.
Sign up for your free account today to create campaigns that go where your audience is.
