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.