Hyperlocal marketing, or the deep focus of a well-defined community, started as a trend in 2009. Fast forward to today, the marketing strategy is now a new standard that business and marketing companies must follow in order to stand out from savvy competitors. Local translation services can help.

Hyperlocal Marketing 101

For those who aren’t familiar with the practice, hyperlocal marketing involves offering a customer with an assortment of local products or services, with focus on the location of the user. For example, a store may flash a smartphone notification about an ongoing sale to a customer when he or she enters the radius of the establishment. One of the first pioneers of this technique is Taco Bell. The brand’s food-ordering app sends out promotions to customers hyperlocally, in real-time. During the initial release of the mobile platform, the company experienced an increase of six percent in sales during the second quarter of 2015.

“To ensure the food is hot, the order is filled only when a customer is within 500 feet of a Taco Bell and notifies the store that he’ll pick up the food inside or at a drive-thru window—the app includes what’s known as a geofence to determine a user’s location,” explained Craig Giammona from Bloomberg.

Analyst from Pitney Bowes opens in a new window, an omnichannel solutions firm that services over 90 percent of the Fortune 500 list of companies, predict that hyperlocal marketing will be the norm for companies of all sizes, including small and medium-sized businesses. With the proliferation of the “Internet of Things” lifestyle, coupled with better access to data analytics, the cost of implementing the unconventional marketing strategy is also getting more affordable and accurate.

Local Translation Services

An effective hyperlocal marketing strategy starts with the human voice. In the digital world, this translates to messages and notifications. But diving deeper into this aspect of the campaign, businesses may also consider the language and choice of words of the message to boost the effectiveness of the delivery. A study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School opens in a new window by Jonah Berger, professor and author of Contagious: Why Things Catch On, suggests that customizing language can add emotional value to the message being conveyed, making it more relatable.

Striking emotion in hyperlocal marketing can help businesses guide customers into performing a specific action, such as making a purchase, entering a store or sharing a message on social media. Information from the IPA databank backs up this practice through a digital vault of over 1,400 successful advertising campaigns. The group uncovered that marketing campaigns filled with emotional content performed almost twice as well opens in a new window (31 percent) as logical content (16 percent), and noticeably better than strategies with mixed content.

“This is the world we live in today, and we are still in the early days of it. As the adoption of location-aware apps grows, and smartphone proliferation continues, the possibilities and potential for growth in hyperlocal mobile advertising will only continue to expand,” explained Ratko Vidakovic from Marketing Land.

“Soon companies will start detecting the language setting on a smart phone through their apps and target users in their native languages with hyperlocal messages,” said Nabil Freij, President of GlobalVision. “Messages can be pre-translated for varying locales and served based on specific geographical, demographic and language needs taking hyperlocalization to new summits!”

Boost your hyperlocal marketing campaign success by taking advantage of local translation services.

10 Tips on Achieving Quality in Translation and Localization

This whitepaper presents applicable ten tips that will help you navigate through the requirements of your professional translation and localization needs and deliver quality messages that will resonate with your clients and users. Download it for free!