The world of digital marketing is always changing and evolving with new tools and tactics emerging constantly.

As a business owner, it can be a challenge to know which marketing trends could actually benefit your business and which are going to waste your time and resources. With that being said, one particular tool is just beginning to garner attention and could become a major game-changer for digital marketing as we know it. Geotargeting by using our brand new Ad Shadow software is a data-driven approach to reaching your potential customers that is already proving to be seriously advantageous at converting clicks into sales. If you want to take your brand’s digital marketing strategy to new heights in 2021, it’s time to add geotargeting to your outreach tool kit.  

What Is It?

Ad Shadow utilizes precise locations associated with your target audience and unique IP addresses to provide hyper-targeted marketing capabilities. If you aren’t already familiar with the term, geolocations refer to the specific coordinates of an internet-connected device, such as a smartphone, computer, or tablet, and the last location where this device accessed the internet. 

For example, if you were waiting for a doctor’s appointment and decided to kill some time while scrolling through Instagram, your last known geolocation would be from that business. Now, this doesn’t mean that every single electronic device is being tracked via geolocation. Anytime you open your smartphone’s settings or visit a new website, you will be prompted with whether or not you’d like to share that device’s location. This puts the ability to have geolocation shared fully in the hands of the user. 

Essentially, Ad Shadow works with this feature to collect data related to that device’s IP (Internet Protocol) address. It’s worth noting that IP addresses can vary depending on whether the device in question is being used from home, work, or any other location where someone may belonging on to the internet.  By combining the use of geolocations and IP addresses, you can develop an advertising strategy geared towards users that have either visited or been in close proximity to your business, your competitors’ businesses and so much more. 

How Does It Work?

If all of the technical terminology is starting to give you a headache, here’s a practical example of how using Ad Shadow can actually benefit your brand. Let’s say you own a coffee shop and you’re looking to entice more customers to visit your store. You could utilize the location of the Starbucks down the street from you and start gathering IP addresses for all of the devices that have recently visited that location. Next, you could send targeted ads to those devices for your hot deals on coffee and watch the results pour in.

It may sound far-fetched, but this is just one example of some of the exact ways that businesses have used our software to their advantage with astounding results. Test trials of Ad Shadow have indicated that brands utilizing this strategy saw a staggering 38% rise in online purchases within a relatively short period of time. 

Not only can geotargeting allow you to zone in on potential customers using an exact location, but it can also allow you to target your ads to their entire household. Once an IP address has been obtained using its geolocation, Ad Shadow can grab the IP addresses from every device in that user’s home. For instance, if someone had visited a pizza shop recently and that shop was using our software, they could target their advertisements to every device in that household and increase the likelihood of future purchases.  

Now, you may be wondering whether or not this could become an ethical dilemma. It’s important to keep in mind that geolocations and IP addresses do not necessarily disclose the identity of the user behind them. Certain factors such as gender and age may be able to be collected using geotargeting, but overall this method of advertising still provides plenty of anonymity for your potential customers. Additionally, we refrain from sending any advertisements to users who are under 18 or over the age of 65 while performing geotargeted campaigns with our software.

How to Incorporate It?

Just like with any other digital marketing tool, you have to have a solid game plan in place to make geotargeting really work for your business. The first step for any good advertising campaign is to start with your branding. After all, it doesn’t matter how many people your ads are reaching if the branding isn’t something that will pique their interest in your product. Begin with identifying who your ideal customer would be, their interests, and what sort of problem they have that your product could ultimately solve. Work with your marketing team to develop an ad creative that fully represents both your brand and speaks to the type of customer you are hoping to attract. 

Once you have a solid game plan for your advertising campaign, you can start incorporating Ad Shadow by identifying the best locations to use for gathering IP addressing from your target customers, whether it’s your own business, a competitor’s business or somewhere else that you think your customers may be visiting. Then you can use that data to start targeting more of your prospective patrons using our cutting-edge software and watch as your conversions grow. Additionally, you can easily evaluate what is or isn’t working for your campaign based on how well the data you’ve collected is performing with our Ad Shadow analytics.

The Conclusion

While many marketing trends have come and gone over the years, early signs point to geotargeting as being a potential game-changer for businesses and consumers alike. By utilizing our data-centric software Ad Shadow, you can connect with your target audience and bring in tremendous results. Even better, your customers also benefit by being shown advertisements for the products they actually want to purchase. Geotargeting is the future of connecting brands to their clients.