The rise of the Internet has made the global market more accessible to businesses. But because of how interconnected we are in the global economy, it has become more challenging for companies to make their brand relevant and relatable. To stay ahead of your competitors, you must foster a better connection with your target audience.
But how much do small businesses spend on advertising? It depends on the country where the small business is located. According to Socially Buzz, in the US, the average monthly advertising cost for a small business is around $2,500 to $12,000. Expert Market reported that the average advertising cost is £978 ($1,167) per month.
Based on a survey conducted by TechWyse on their clients, they found that advertising is $1,500-$5,000 per month. Meanwhile, in India, the average advertising cost for a small business is around Rs. 5,000 ($60) to Rs. 100,000 ($1,207) per month.
As you can see, even if your small business is on a budget, there’s no excuse for you to not try new ways to increase engagement and brand awareness. What better way to promote your brand than localizing content based on your target market’s linguistic and cultural preferences? Content Marketing Institute reported that 84% of marketers had said they saw a moderate to highly positive impact on revenue growth from localized content they generated.
Today, we will discuss how hyper-localization can make the most of your small business advertising costs. We will also explore how localization specialists and neural machine translation can enhance your user experience.
Keep on reading to learn more!
What is Hyper-Localization?
Before we get started, let’s first define hyper-localization. It is a localization practice that creates personalized content based on the data and research gathered from customers in a region or specific localization. From the collected data of your users, like preferences, demographics, and personal interests, you can create content and products that will be highly appealing to your potential customers.
But what makes hyper-localization different compared to conventional localization practices? Regarding outcome, hyper-localization and localization have the same goals: to create relevant and relatable content for international users that will promote your brand and persuade them to purchase your products or services. They differ in how they achieve these objectives with the information they get on the specific users who could become potential customers.
An example of this is that when localizing, marketers usually take into account a more broad approach to how they prepare products, services, and marketing content for a targeted country or region. For example, you plan to localize your marketing content on social media, so you research which social media platform your target users often use.
With hyper-localization, it takes a step further. You conduct a competitor analysis of your target locale and identify unique market gaps yet to be offered to the users. For example, on your competitor’s social media accounts, you discovered they don’t provide seamless payment options despite the social media platform offering it. Also, based on your customer research, your target users prefer locally-sourced and organic products, so you cater to this demand.
However, you will still need to work with a language professional to ensure that the content generated is relatable to your target audience. Also, to maximize the advertising cost for your small business, you should learn how to leverage neural machine translation to further enhance your localization efforts’ accuracy and efficiency.
3 Tips to Cost Effective Advertising for Small Businesses Without Compromising Quality
Appia reported that 86% of their localized campaigns outperformed their English counterparts in per clicks and conversions. They also discovered that the localized version saw a click-through rate of 3.34% and a 9.08% conversion rate. These are very positive results from simply localizing advertisements and marketing campaigns.
Imagine if the campaign was hyper-localized to suit their target customer’s needs and preferences. There’s a high possibility that those positive results would have increased.
So, to get started in creating your hyper-localization strategy and ensure that your business advertising costs are being utilized efficiently and effectively, we’ve listed a couple of things you need to do before anything else.
1. Cultivate a Deep Understanding of Your User’s Cultural and Linguistic Preferences
It might seem like an obvious thing to do. But as history has shown, even the most prominent companies out there had experienced blunders in their marketing campaigns because they skipped doing their market research, surveys, and studies when they expanded into a new market. With the analytic tools readily available in the market, there are no excuses why you can’t invest and use those tools.
Yes, this step will take some time. But it’s better to do your marketing campaign and operations right the first time around instead of patching things up in the long run, as it’s more costly to do damage control.
2. Enhance Customer Experience through Audience Segmentation
From your research, you can begin audience segmentation and start identifying potential customers and the level of engagement of demographic groups from your target locale.
You can maximize the Return on Investment (ROI) in small business advertising costs by dividing your target audience into more manageable and smaller segments and implementing a marketing strategy based on this.
3. Increase Engagement by Having an Effective Strategy for Your Target Locale
Lastly, after you have made all the necessary research and preparations, you can create a hyper-localization strategy based on the geo-targeted data you’ve gathered and segment your audience accordingly.
You can start implementing changes on your website, apps, content creation, SEO strategy, and the newest search integration options to create an engaging user experience and make your brand stand out from the rest.
4 Key Considerations for Small Businesses Looking to Hyper-Localized Their Advertising
Suppose you have a concrete picture of what you want to do with your advertising efforts. In that case, it will be easier for your localization specialist to accommodate you in achieving your objectives. Below are a couple of tips on how to implement hyper-localization and get the most out of working with localization specialists.
1. Hyper-Localize Your SEO Strategy
By now, you must have realized that the keywords used in your local market are different from those in other countries and regions, even if they’re English-speaking countries. Before you can hyper-localize your SEO, you need to know your basic local SEO. By doing so, you can effectively use your Google advertising cost for a small business in tools, techniques, and campaigns to maximize your ROI.
You can begin incorporating these local SEO techniques and integrate them into your websites and apps, creating landing pages. After internally implementing it on your platforms, you can start reaching out to online citations and local directories, advertise geo-targeted videos and content, and embed local reviews on your website.
2. Create Relevant and Interesting Content
The data you’ve gathered can be your guide to creating visual and text-based content that aligns with your segmented audience that specifically targets them. You can adjust your tone and approach for each demographic group in your target locale.
When creating content, you should look to SEO as a guide and not as an end-all-be-all in creating content. There shouldn’t be a conflict between SEO and content creation, as both sides work together. By finding a balance, you can enhance your customer’s journey.
3. Leverage the Power of Local Influencers and Partnerships
Collaborating with organizations and influencers can increase awareness and establish your local market presence. The local influencers you can tap are bloggers, local media, community leaders, and video content creators to promote your brand.
With local businesses and organizations, you can create joint projects like product demos, events, and discounts. For example, you sell skin care products and collaborate with local spas by offering them discounts and benefits. You can also do referrals with your local partners.
4. Measure and Optimize the Performance of Advertising Campaigns
After incorporating your hyper-localization strategy into your operations and marketing, you can use your data analytic tools to see if there are any changes in the number of clicks and conversion rates. It will take time to see the changes, and if you’re not obtaining the desired results, you can constantly adjust it.
It’s always good to keep track of any changes in the metrics of your advertising campaigns, like clicks, impressions, and conversions. By doing so, you can make better decisions in optimizing your advertising based on the data you’ve acquired.
Conclusion
Digital marketing has democratized expansion to new markets, regardless of the advertising costs for small businesses.
Hopefully, the tips and advice will be helpful when you discuss with localization specialists the best approach for hyper-localizing your advertising campaign and business.
