The Ready-to-Buy Psychology of Local Online Marketing

The internet is not just a global medium. It’s a powerful local medium. No matter where you live, people are searching for the service you provide with a local modifier: “[your city] [your service]” (like “Chicago dog walker” or “Kansas plumber”).

Marketing with this “[your city] [your service]” technique has some advantages: It’s faster to achiever higher search engine ranking placement and it costs less because you’re not competing against larger multinational conglomerations with huge search engine optimization budgets.

But there’s something else that is important to consider about the psychology of searchers who are searching locally. Let’s say you are thinking of buying a car. You type in “car” into a search engine and see what comes up. Maybe you narrow it down by manufacturer.

So, let’s say that as you do your research you go from searching for “car” to searching for “midsize car” to searching amongst “general motors”, “ford”, “dodge”.

This is all at the conceptual level; the research level. What happens when you’re ready to buy? You don’t just type in “Ford dealership”.

No. If you live in Atlanta, you type in “Atlanta Ford dealership”… Notice that’s the [your city] [service] search.

So, the psychology of people search locally is this: They are ready to buy.

The web is a powerful research tool, but the terms used to research are general and broad. Searchers hit credible, authoritative sites to get more information. And when they’re ready to buy? They add a local modifier and look to a solution provider in their neighborhood.

What is Hyperlocal?

The internet has been a highly valued vehicle to connect the world. Our globe is much smaller now thanks to the speed with which we can connect with others. Friends, family, and businesses can all connect far easier because of the web and it technologies. Email, voice-over-internet-protocol (VOIP), instate messaging, Twitter… All of these tools and so much more allows us to collaborate with someone on the other side of the world as if they are right next to us.

From global to local
But people are realizing that they’ve looked so far afield for business and relationships at a great distance that they have nearly forgotten about those right next door. To right this wrong, people reset their sites to try and cover both global and local markets in an initiative called “glocal”.

So the web – which has long been touted as a global medium – has now also become a local medium, focused on a specific and defined community (like a city, town, or smaller geographic unit).

Hyperlocal definition
That’s the trend you need to know about first, so here’s how the term “hyperlocal” fits in: According to Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperlocal “hyperlocal” serves a very specific geographic region with content created for residents of that region by a resident of that region. In other words, hyperlocal isn’t just a distant view of a narrowly defined area. Rather, it is an extremely specific way to serve an extremely specific market.

If you run a business serving a specific geographic area and your marketing is targeting that area, you are a hyperlocal marketer. That might not change what you do or how you do it, but it’s important to know the rising trend in the concept.