As you’ve heard many times before, location is everything. Buying a home? Opening a business? Providing consumers relevant ads? Location, location, location.
Location is an important aspect of everyday life. That is why being able to advertise based on location is key for any successful digital campaign.
In the digital marketing world, geo-targeting is the method of delivering different content to visitors based on their location. For optimal success, the capability to pinpoint location down to a granular level is crucial to ensure the delivery of advertisements to the most relevant customer base.
For example, if you own a small business with multiple locations only in the eastern region of a state, why waste advertising dollars on the state as a whole? Capturing consumers who are hours away from your nearest location by serving them your ads ultimately wastes advertising dollars. This is because the likelihood of them converting is very low level, compared to those who are viewing your ads and living within a close radius.
Now, marketers and advertisers can zero in on location when it comes to their ads on TikTok, a new feature introduced by the app in 2021. The social media giant, which stormed the scene in early 2018, now connects businesses of all sizes to a large community of consumers they’ve been unable to reach before.
TikTok enabled Designated Market Area (DMA) geo-targeting early this year. DMAs, a group of counties that form an exclusive geographic area, including 210 DMA regions within the continental United States, Hawaii, and parts of Alaska, can now be targeted by marketers and advertisers using the app.
TikTok, which is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms in the world, and as of January 2021, the platform had 689 million monthly active users worldwide, has a large following among users between ages 10 and 29. But the app also includes a percentage of older adults.
With that said, TikTok is a major player in the social marketing industry and has even more appeal for advertisers based on its ability to geo-target for local businesses. Those businesses can now reach consumers with relevant, interesting, and impactful content by targeting at a more granular level than before, saving them time and resources.
When compared to more veteran social media platforms, TikTok is unsaturated, which provides a great up-swing to the new kid on the block. However, the platforms’ location targeting is limited compared to another well-known marketing giant, Facebook.
Facebook offers numerous ways to narrow targeting locally, offering not only DMA targeting but geo-targeting by country, state/region, cities, zip code and address. As TikTok continues to evolve, its’ geo-targeting capabilities will likely expand.
In the meantime, as businesses look to reach consumers in new, exciting ways, DMA geo-targeting is a fantastic option for social media marketing for both small and large businesses.
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Universal Media, Inc. (UMI) was founded in 1986 by three advertising professionals, creating one of the largest and fastest-growing locally based independent media agencies, specializing in strategic planning, research and media buying.
