Imagine this: someone of your perfect demographic comes across an ad for your store. They’re excited about it. They explore your website and realize that you have everything they’ve been looking for in a local outlet. Then they look at the address… and realize that they live a five-hour drive away!

Take another scenario: you create an ad based on a joke about Florida beach tourists. Floridians will see the ad and laugh. They will feel understood by your brand, and like you have a more intimate connection. But the rest of the country, when they come across your ad, just get the impression that your brand is weird and unfunny.

These stories illustrate the importance of location-based marketing. Location-based marketing directs advertising at users within a certain geographic region. This has many advantages.

First, you can direct your ads only at people who are within reasonable access to your establishment. This reduces marketing costs and keeps your ads relevant. As a bonus, ads that are relevant to users are considered less annoying.

Second, if you are directing ads only towards a certain area, it makes it easier to make the ads feel relevant to the personalities of locals. Take the earlier Floridian reference – people in a certain area know the same grocery store chain, the same geographical landmarks, the same traffic problems. They follow the same sports teams and sometimes are even involved in the same local industries.

This gives you an opportunity to reference these commonalities in your marketing and get in touch with consumers on a more intimate basis. Referencing local phenomena also makes your audience feel like you understand them, and that you are one of them. Trying to make an ad appeal to a city of people is much easier than making one ad appeal to a country of people. If you have the resources, tailoring ads in various locations to that location can be a good bet for return on investment.

Plus, location-based marketing doesn’t have to be as expensive as you think! Strategies for making pages on location based apps like Yelp or Google can even be free, or at least, only as expensive as the time of the people working on them.