Blogging Heros
Technological innovations and the internet have turned the universe into a global village so to speak. Despite the advancement, location data remains indispensable.
In marketing, geo-market segregation has shown a high level of efficacy in supplementing a business’ overall strategy. Evidence is that this will continue to evolve to become even better.
Awareness of the location of your target market will enable you, the marketing professional to initiate conversations and therefore send personalized messages. This will effectively build your company’s brand image out there.
For those aware of location tagging get confused by two related terms – geotagging and geolocation. Some internet marketers have even used the two terms interchangeably which is an outright misnomer.
Both of these terms are used for location-based marketing. However, they aren’t exactly the same. Here, we are going to explore geotagging and geolocation, the relationship between them, and their differences.
Geotagging Explained
Geotagging is the process of appending geographical data to a video, a photo, or any such media in the form of metadata. Put simply, it means adding the coordinates (longitudes and latitudes) of the location of the media to be localized.
Geotags help customers and prospective customers, employees, and your business associates to find when and where the photograph or the video was taken or where a social media update was posted or an article was written.
The clearest evidence of geotagging in the digital world is seen in social media. For example, an information technology manager of a firm uploads photographs and videos on Instagram or Telegram while attending a tech conference.
The conference venue gets automatically tagged as the location but only if the user’s device was enabled for location sharing.
Regardless of the timing of the geotag, marketers at software firms can gather a decent amount of leads by looking at the social media posts tagging the said location. You can learn more about how to geotag images if you still find this information confusing.
Geolocation Explained
Geolocation is the process by which the geographical position of an individual is identified based on the digital information given off by the person’s internet-enabled device.
Several technologies are available to help determine a person’s geographical location, with the use of IP addresses being the most common. Listed below are the details experts can dig from a customer’s IP address.
- Country
- State/Region or Province
- Coordinates (Longitude and altitude)
- Time zone
- Town/City
- Postal Code
Luckily, there is IP Geolocation API is a perfect source of this information. It can return these details with high levels of accuracy. This is because its database has over 30 million IP ranges – both IPv4 and IPv6 – in 250 countries around the globe. That translates to 260,568 unique locations.
You might be asking how this data can help marketers in boosting their businesses. Discussed below is how it works.
1. Personalization of Web Content
You won’t believe this but users usually became frustrated when they find it difficult to relate to the content they see. This web content personalization is crucial if you want to augment customer experience.
However, not all customers are comfortable with this level of customization for fear of having their privacy compromised. IP Geolocation is not as invasive and therefore eliminates this problem by striking some balance between personalization and ensuring customer privacy.
Knowing the general location of your customers means you can present your web content in their language while considering cultural aspects and local currencies.
2. Strategies For Pricing
The price of services and products your business offers forms one of the 4 Ps of a successful marketing mix. Geolocation plays a vital role in improving the price strategies of your establishment. This is because you will have some information on the currency strength, inflation rate, and purchase power of your prospective customers.
Other factors such as currency conversion rates between your currency and that of your customers, custom fees, and tax rates are crucial in developing price strategies. You know all these issues depend on the consumer’s location, your business can better optimize revenue when they upload geolocation data into your dynamic pricing.
3. Online Mobile Marketing
You can use geolocation data in conjunction with geofencing to deliver real-time alerts to buyers via their mobile apps. For instance, when the geolocation data of an app user indicates he/she is within the company’s geofence, an alert is triggered to inform him/her of any special offers or promotions available.
Geolocation Vs Geotagging
Geotagging and geolocation work in synergy to help with geotag SEO. In other words, geotagging used geolocation data comparable with the concept of the target market and the personal details of the customer.
Thus user’s knowledge of the targeted market gives way to creating a product’s or service’s persona just the same way geolocation feeds a user’s ability to geotag.
Being aware of your target market to be able to tailor products, services, promotions, loyalty programs, and prices to specific to the needs and desires of customers.
Wrapping It Up
Thus geolocation and geotagging are different concepts but they work together harmoniously to geotag images for search engine optimization. You will need both of them if you want to get the most out of your online marketing. If you are still confused then you can speak to an IT expert or programmer for additional help.
