What Is Geographic Segmentation?
Geographic segmentation targets potential customers based on their location, making it an effective addition to an overall marketing strategy for local businesses. Combine it with other segmentation methods like demographics and online shopping behavior, and you have a solid place to build from when planning a branding and marketing strategy.
Find out how geographic segmentation works, what its advantages and disadvantages are, and how you can use it to reach new customers.
What Is geographic segmentation?
Geographic segmentation is a marketing strategy that groups a target market by location. You can then tailor your ads and promotional messages to potential leads in various geographic areas. This can be especially useful when planning a local search strategy.
How does geographic segmentation work?
GPS data, geotargeting technology, regional purchasing trends, and even census data are all used as tools to implement geographic segmentation into a marketing strategy. Most times, this info categorizes consumers based on various location-specific factors, such as:
Country, region, time zone, state, or city
Urban vs rural areas
Climate and weather
Market density
Local traditions and preferences
Why do marketers use geographic segmentation?
Geographic segmentation serves as a preliminary point of reference to start nailing down who your ideal customers are. It allows us to target local leads and plan local SEO initiatives, including organic and paid search strategies to ensure relevancy when promoting brick-and-mortar businesses. And compared to other strategies, it’s often cost-efficient and easy to get started.
Advantages of geographic segmentation
Geographic segmentation can also enhance personalization, boost targeting efficiency, and strengthen brand loyalty when ads are tailored to specific location-based needs. In some cases, it can also encourage better inventory and logistics management, since you can streamline supply chain activities based on local demands.
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Drawbacks of geographic segmentation
While geographic segmentation has its place in a marketing plan, it can also pose several challenges:
Oversimplifies your audience
Geographic segmentation doesn’t account for important customer variables like age, gender, income, lifestyle, and cultural diversity. Instead, it generalizes everyone living, working, or passing through a specific location. This becomes a challenge because not everyone within a certain zip code will have the same interests, behaviors, and habits.
Doesn’t account for any nuance in location
Demographics and personal preferences can vary drastically by neighborhood, so a marketing strategy that’s effective in one part of the city may be completely fruitless in another. So, geographic segmentation alone won’t account for these differences.
Potential to miss the right people
Another challenge of relying solely on geographic segmentation is that it uses various assumptions based on a single factor: location. Without considering niche markets and microclimates, you could risk missing valuable leads from your marketing campaigns.
Limits personalization
Selling products and services is all about solving your customers' problems and showing them how your offer can address their needs. To do this, you must first understand their preferences, motivations, and pain points, and those factors can rarely be identified on a map.
Overemphasizes location
Geographic location is only one approach to segmenting your audience into various categories. Demographics, behavioral patterns, and psychological variations can tell you a lot more about people’s habits and purchasing power than location alone.
Challenges with data
Collecting relevant and up-to-date information is both challenging and expensive. Geographic data changes constantly, which can mean less-than-stellar marketing efforts with this strategy alone. Privacy and security concerns can also pose a challenge to collecting customer data, as well as your business’s reputation.
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Tips to make geographic segmentation effective
If you’re going to implement geographic segmentation into your marketing strategy, use it alongside other segmentation tactics that provide valuable insights into your audience’s behaviors, motivations, and backgrounds.
By combining several approaches to how you group your target audience, you can build more effective marketing campaigns that are tailored to these unique variations. Here are several forms of segmentation to use alongside your geographic data:
Demographic segmentation
A marketing strategy that employs demographic segmentation will consider certain measurable characteristics to better target customers, including:
Age
Gender
Education level
Income level
Occupation
Marital status
Family size
This strategy accounts for a lot of differences within a particular location, so it can offer better results than geographic segmentation alone. You can use demographics to create personalized marketing messages that cater to diverse audiences based on life stages, budgets, and purchasing power.
Psychographic segmentation
Understanding your audience’s motivations is a big part of any marketing strategy. Psychographic segmentation uses market research and real-world experience to explain why customers do what they do and make certain purchases. This approach creates population segments based on lifestyles, values, beliefs, interests, and personality traits to connect with consumers on an emotional level.
Behavioral segmentation
While psychographics digs into the “why” behind your customers’ actions, behavioral segmentation groups audiences based on the actions themselves. By studying buying habits, brand loyalty, product usage, and trigger points, you can adjust your approach for more effective targeting based on experiential data.
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Most successful marketing campaigns utilize various strategies to better understand the needs, goals, and motivations of their leads and customers. But one thing is certain: to attract more leads, increase conversion rates, and boost customer satisfaction, it’s important to target marketing messages on a granular level in addition to general location.
While geographic segmentation can be a valuable tool, it should be combined with other effective approaches to enhance your overall marketing strategy. If you’re ready to take your marketing strategy to the next level, Grove Brands is here to help! Explore our branding, marketing, and SEO services, or reach out today to get started!
