How To Utilize Instagram Location Targeting For Your Local Business

Many social media apps, like Instagram, will market themselves by showing off the amazing reach that they have – and it truly is astounding. Your business post on Instagram could reach someone on the other side of the world in seconds, but, while this sounds great for online businesses, it’s not so useful for the businesses which are local, like, for example, a local painter who can’t just travel to Japan for a job because someone there saw their advertisement on Instagram. For local businesses, the best way to market on Instagram is with location targeting.

How Is It Used?

Geotags are the most common way to use Instagram’s location targeting. This option is open to businesses for sponsored posts, but it does cost more than a usual sponsored post. If your account is a business account (which it should be, and, if it isn’t, a quick search through settings should make you able to sort out it becoming a business account) and has location turned on, you can use geotags in your advertisements on Instagram. When you make a post, you should be able to select the option to use geotags, in order to reach the right target audience.

How do they work?

“Geotags are clever little nuggets of Instagram genius, which allow you to pinpoint who sees your content,” Lisa Price, a lifestyle blogger at Writinity and Lastminutewriting, says. “You’ll be able to choose whether people who are in a certain location, have travelled near it, recently been near it or live in it see your advertisements – and the customization doesn’t stop there. Once you’ve selected that, you can change the locational settings to a country, city, specific address or postcode, to make sure that you’re targeting the right people in the right place.”

Locations

Your specific store – if it is a building – may not already be in the Instagram location archives, so inputting an address might not show it up as being your store. However, you can easily fix this with the Facebook ‘Create The Location’ feature. Simply go into your, or your business’, Facebook account and choose Create The Location to assign your business to the address of your store. From there, make sure that you try and use the exact same name for your business every time you post about it using geotags, since this will create a feeling of familiarity within your followers and encourage them to post about it using the same name and location.

Detailed Audiences

If you want to use Instagram’s location targeting to an even more extreme degree, then you can actually use detailed targeting to make sure that only specific types of people see your advertisements. For example, if you wanted only people who had recently moved into the area and would feasibly need decorating and painting to be done to see your advertisements, then you could select this in the detailed targeting and make sure that only those people in your area would see your advertisements, making it very specific and useful.

Stickers

Once you’ve set your store’s location as a geotag, you can also create stickers for Instagram stories with the store’s name on it, which will appear as an option when a user wants to create a story at your store’s location. “Everyone loves Instagram stories, so what better way to use your location targeting than with a fun sticker?” Laura Mitchell, a beauty blogger at Draft beyond and Researchpapersuk, asks. “Make sure that your location is definitely a geotag with the Create The Location feature in Facebook, then make stories of your own with the cool location stickers for your followers to copy. It’s an easy, professional-looking design which saves you having to make your own stickers for your store’s name on your Instagram story!”

Conclusion

Location targeting is brilliant for local businesses, due to all of its little nuances which allow businesses to be creative with who they advertise to, and also giving them some creative freedom with their store’s stickers as well. Although it costs a little bit more, it’s certainly worth it and will make sure that your advertising works a lot better than it used to, since it will be very specific, look professional and valid on Instagram and be shown to the right people who will be most likely to interact with it and utilize it.

Ashley Brooks works on startup marketing at Lucky Assignments and Gum Essays, helping her clients to build up their brands and become huge successes. She enjoys writing in order to share her great experience with and knowledge of the marketing field.