3 reasons you should geolocate your buyers' journey

Geographical location plays a crucial role in the behavior of a visitor. In fact, the success of a company lies on its core audience's understanding of its brand and value proposition. But, a value proposition understood and popular in France, might not be in Germany—beside the obvious language barrier.

What is geolocation?

It allows you to personalize your communication with visitors/customers depending on their location. The extent of what you can do is linked with the technology involved (GPS, IP address, …) On the web, geolocation is done through the visitor's IP address. You can determine their city from their internet access point. Then you keep track of it through cookies. We all experienced personalized and geolocated offers, be it Google's restaurant suggestions or close-by distribution points after an online purchase. This type of geolocation is becoming the norm for many companies. For online consumers though, it's expected. With a Web Personalization solution, you can adapt your content, messages, and offers depending on the city, region or country of your visitor. On the same page/URL, you could wish a "good evening" to a Londoner and "good morning to an American who just woke up. The goal is simple: a personalized and relevant experience. In this article, we'll give you 3 reasons to geolocate your buyer's journey:

• building a purposeful segmentation
• presenting contextualized content
• convincing your audience

1. Building a purposeful segmentation

Thanks to new technologies, Marketing is completely different. More productive, precise, personalized but more than anything, measurable. However, Marketing at its core didn't change. Without an extensive knowledge about your audience, and a purposeful segmentation, your results will be subobtimal..

To geolocate, is to know your audience better and discover who you're talking to

Geolocation is an integral part of segmentation. It allows you to do a macro-segmentation. It separates a market with a unique and differentiating criteria (region, country, sex, etc.).

2. Proposing a contextualized content

Be closer to your audience … and its needs

Each region has its own behavioral specificities. A study of football, tennis, rugby and sailing popularity in France is a good example: source : Slate Except for football—played everywhere in the country, we notice strong disparities in regions for the other sports. National sports stores chains should then adapt their communication strategy to the local interests. This study is about differences French regions, imagine from one country to another! And without taking cultural criteria like the language, food, religion, etc.

Once you know who to address. You need to find out what to say.

A minimalist navigation

Geolocation improves the navigation experience and establish the basis of a relationship between the visitor and the company. It also allows you to decrease friction by presenting to the visitor the information he came for.

Promotions at the right time

Optimizing your performances requires personalized sales campaigns. Once your visitors' segments are identified, you can push contextual promotionnal offers and, for example offer a coupon via email your visitors can use in the closest physical store or inform them through a pop-in (if they are on desktop, e-mail if on mobile) about a commercial event in their region.

The benefits work both ways. Your company improves its conversion rate and the visitor has content relevant to him.

3. Convincing your audience

Be better understood by your clients

Quality content isn't enough. We mentionned it earlier, you shouldn't neglect the cultural dimension implied with different geographical locations. Here's an example: the way you read. If you look at these pictures from left to right, the story makes sens.

1. I'm exhausted.
2. I'm drinking a soda.
3. I recovered a bit and resume my run.

Now, in some cultures, you read from right to left. The story is quite different that way:

1. I'm running.
2. I stop to drink a soda…
3. … and die horribly.

A detail ... but potentially catastrophic. Like demonstrated above, translating content sometimes isn't enough. In certain cases, you need to adapt it for your audience to understand and be convinced.

Spare your visitors some time

Having content personalized with geolocation also allow you to spare your visitors some time.

“Time is money” Benjamin Franklin

A first time visitor will only look far a few seconds to find what he came for. If he doesn't find it, he'll go back to his search engine and go to your competitors. That's why it is so important to work on the relevance of the information you present your visitors with so you can reduce the time they spend looking for it. PagesJaunes (french yellow pages, and one of our client) does this very well. Geolocation allows them to pre-fill the city field in the search and show relevant local offers. Geolocated Personalization is very effective to boost conversions and improve customer loyalty. It's definitely a strong commercial asset.