Digitizing Local Ads to Track the Full Customer Journey
For millions of businesses, local advertising still fulfills a critical and crucial role in the customer journey. Retailers, quick-service restaurants, auto dealerships, and even banks largely rely on local foot traffic for sales – and that means advertising locally. Historically, brands have done this through paper advertisements, with locally distributed banners, posters, flyers, brochures, and catalogues. While costs are on the rise, with paper costs estimated to rise by 400% between 2020 and the fourth quarter of 2022, there’s little difference in how advertisers spend their money. In Germany, ad spend on paper catalogues is still hovering at €2,039 million euros per year – with just a 0.2% decline from 2021.
Meanwhile, nearly every other aspect of advertising has digitized, moving online to programmatic, automation, and central management. Omnichannel advertisers can track every click, hover, and second spent viewing the ad, allowing marketers to optimize ads for interaction in ways that have never before been possible. For local advertising, where ads are often stuck in flyers, brochures, and product magazines, that isn’t the case. Instead, advertisers hope their ads are being seen – but with no way to track that data and no way to link it into omnichannel marketing – there's no way to be sure.
Digitizing Local Ads
Adcombi’s hyperlocal advertising technology enables marketers to build local ads, targeted to a single zip code as part of a larger national campaign. The technology uses a combination of polygon targeting and geolocation to refine how location targeting works – enabling more precise zip code targeting, cutting off ads at geographic markers, or better splitting regions between franchise locations.
This enables marketers to target locations in hyper-specific ways, such as putting cutoff points at a river, following the contours of a neighborhood, or advertising on one side of a freeway but not the other.
Adcombi also enables multi-location businesses, such as banks, dealerships, franchise restaurants, and retail chains to create large national campaigns with national assets and then integrate local campaigns with local budgets and stakeholders. We use automation to set up individual lines on the DSP, enabling every location to quickly and affordably set up their own campaign for control of budgets, assets, and local-specific information – while retaining national-level asset control and central management.
From there, every location can push ads to its sales regions, showing relevant, local, and location-specific ads to customers.
Local advertising faces numerous hurdles in moving to digital. These include factors such as:
- The need for hyperlocal ad presence based on sales areas (normally defined by zip code)
- The need for custom assets and information per location, with local addresses, offers, etc.
- Limited budgets and assets – with many point of sale stakeholders not being marketing experts
- The increasing shift of target users away from paper media and towards omni-channel formats like social media and display ads
Adcombi solves all of these with a combination of hyperlocal polygon targeting, individual campaigns per location as part of a larger national campaign, central asset management, and ongoing support from our in-house team of marketing experts.
Bringing Local Data into Your Omni-Channel Marketing
Digitizing even a part of local advertising saves costs on paper, enables more dynamic ads, and enables real-time data such as stock, live data feeds, etc., as part of the ad. But, it also means that local advertising can integrate into omnichannel marketing. This means that, for the first time, in-house marketing experts can contribute to creating and optimizing local ads with knowledge gained from those omnichannel strategies – and vice versa.
If local ads start generating data, like time spent on the page, visibility, click rate, etc., advertisers can start using that data to make better decisions for those ads. In addition, you can use simple testing to improve ads over time – optimize ads per specific location and take that back to any ads you retain in print. And, with local advertising as part of your overall omnichannel advertising strategy, you can integrate that data into the full customer journey – tracking visibility between national campaigns at top-of-funnel and conversion at a local level.
As everything shifts to programmatic, your wealth of data on customer behavior, ad interaction, target groups, etc., can come into play for your local advertising. And, that will enable you to make better targeting decisions, to actually target beyond “just” local, and to drive more clicks and footfall with hyperlocal and hyper relevant ads. In fact, our data shows that even adding local data like addresses and route planners can increase clicks by 60%.
If your local advertising is still completely analog, it may be time to consider testing digital and programmatic as part of your local advertising strategy. If you’re interested, contact us to have a discussion, we’re happy to help.
