How To Do Hyperlocal Marketing with AI

Need to become a local expert? AI's got your back!

March 14, 2024

 

Hello AI marketers!

Welcome to this week’s edition of the AI Marketing School, where we're diving deep into hyperlocal marketing – with an AI twist. 

Local businesses need local marketing strategies that pinpoint customers at the regional, district, or even street level.

Hyperlocal marketing zeroes in on a well-defined community or geographical area, sometimes as narrow as a single street or neighborhood. This is particularly potent for businesses that are physically part of these communities, such as cafes, gyms, and independent shops.

And that’s what we’re going to break down today.

Local Marketing Needs Local Knowledge

Now, here’s the problem: what if you don’t have any clue about the community you need to market to? 

This happens more than you might think. Say you’re expanding a cafe outside of your home city to somewhere you’re unfamiliar with. 

Or for the SEO pros out there – suppose your client is expanding into new local markets and the responsibility falls on you to create impactful campaigns. 

You can’t shoot in the dark and hope to hit the target. But luckily, AI can make you a local expert in minutes. 

And what better way to demonstrate this than through a fictional specialty coffee franchise, "Bean There,” planning to open its doors in the heart of historic Savannah, Georgia—a city known for its rich history and vibrant art scene, something largely unfamiliar to our hypothetical marketer.

Expanding Into New Areas and Markets

Bean There is looking to capitalize on a few expansion opportunities. Part of the reason it succeeded in the first place was because the owner really knew their local area. 

How can they repeat that trick to repeat that success? ChatGPT can step in. 

Objective 1: Getting Quality Local Insights Fast With AI

First, we’ll explore insights into Savannah's local culture, interests, and events to tailor "Bean There's" marketing efforts effectively.

Ask questions to gather information on popular local activities, coffee preferences, and key cultural events that could influence potential customers, for example:

And immediately, we’ve found some really cool information that might have taken weeks or months to discover otherwise. I think the idea of the local flavored coffee is particularly brilliant. 

You can probe it more, e.g., to find regular cultural events like the Savannah Music and Film Festival. Always remember to fact-check your results. 

Objective 2: Develop Insights Into Content

Next, we’ll develop engaging, locally relevant content ideas and hashtags for social media campaigns.

Next up, we can use ChatGPT to generate local content marketing and social media ideas. 

Again, those are some pretty good ideas right off the bat. All in all that took about 2 minutes. Going through the traditional local research process might have taken hours.

You can build and iterate on top of your research and even ask ChatGPT to generate ready-to-post locally targeted blog posts. 

You’ll find that one idea tends to lead to another.💡

Here are a few great AI marketing resources and tools I’ve encountered recently. Enjoy!

HubSpot set out to prove whether AI can do one-to-one email personalization at scale by leveraging just a few pieces of customer data.

Altman made a brazen prediction for marketing, stating in an interview for a new book Our AI Journey: “95% of what marketers use agencies, strategists, and creative professionals for today will easily, nearly instantly and at almost no cost be handled by the AI — and the AI will likely be able to test the creative against real or synthetic customer focus groups for predicting results and optimizing.”

The Drum recently wrote about how search algorithms can wrongly profile customers and make it more difficult for them to find the products they’re searching for. They recommend reevaluating whether you truly know who your customers are and figuring out why they’re motivated to search for your products.

What did you think of today’s email?

What did you think of today’s email? Loved it? Hated it? Hit reply and tell me why.

Until next Friday! Happy marketing.

The AI Marketer