Remember the days when Carmen Sandiego could be found all over the world on your childhood computer screen? Created to get children interested in geography, this computer game used a simple question as a catchphrase to turn into a multi-media franchise. How can asking this question be valuable to your business?

One job of a public relations professional is to determine the best communication strategy for our clients to connect with their target audiences. In the age of the World Wide Web, it can be difficult to make your message stand out among the millions of other streams of information available. However, one way to ensure your message is getting to your audiences is by finding out where in the world your audiences are located. Once you have determined this, you can use geo-targeting to more effectively share your message.

 What is geo-targeting? Geo-targeting is a tool that helps specify your target audience or demographic based on their location. For example, a local electronic store that just opened in East Memphis would use geo-targeting to let people know of its services via Facebook. Ultimately, the store managers want everyone in Memphis to know about their services, but especially those in the surrounding neighborhood. Therefore, they use geo-targeting on Facebook to promote the company as the “neighbor electronic store” to users in East Memphis. Whereas, they would promote the company as a “local electronic store” to users located in other areas of town. This tool is a necessity to ensure you are delivering the best content to potential customers in distinct locations. From experience, I can verify that using geo-targeting on posts engages and interests more users because they can more closely relate to the post.

The phrase “geo-targeting” is most commonly used in reference to targeting audiences on social media. Many social media platforms have the option to only send your post or tweet to users in a specific location. How do they do this?  There are two main ways – IP or recorded address. An IP address is tracked by software through the web browser that determines where a user logs in. A recorded address is the current street address and city/state that a user has listed on his or her profile. In addition, you can filter your audience further by including age, gender, language, interest or connections.

Geo-targeting sounds like an intimidating process, but never fear, it is actually pretty easy. Click here to check out a blog post by Constant Contact to learn more about geo-targeting and how to use it on popular social media platforms.

In conclusion, remember that just like Carmen Sandiego, your audiences can be anywhere in the world. And, your message can be, too, by using tools such as geo-targeting to ensure the most appropriate content is delivered to each of your audiences.