Creating a Successful Hyperlocal Marketing Strategy
In 2016, GoMechanic started with solving repair & maintenance issues for car owners in a single city. The founding team had a strong belief of first getting the product & experience right instead of expanding to multiple cities without cracking the exact set of India’s car owners needs & expectations. Even today, when GoMechanic is present in India’s top 19 cities, the team continues to focus on understanding city-wise tastes & preferences & ensuring the local teams cater to those.
For most Indians, a car is most often their second largest purchase, after a house. An Indian car owner not only wants high quality repair & maintenance services but is reluctant to try anyone who is not within a 5 km radius from them. Choosing car services is most often a very hyperlocal choice. Thus, leading to the need for hyperlocal marketing.
Hyperlocal marketing is really about targeting potential consumers in a highly specific, geographically restricted area, sometimes just a few pin codes, most often with the aim of reaching people conducting “near me” searches on their smartphones. People doing “Near me” searches always have a strong intention to transact & we designed an intricate plan to cater to these.
With most urban consumers following ROPO (research online, purchase offline), it becomes important to be the strongest option that search threw up for people who were looking for car servicing options near them. The best SEO trends & best practices were put into play to ensure we steadily improve our ranking in search results. Our consistent top organic ranking is a testimony to how the offering addresses an important consumer need.
With online catering to people seeking solutions for their car problems, a separate offline strategy was created to occupy space in the mind of the consumer even before they even have a need. This was done via hyperlocal advertising & events.
For hyperlocal advertising, we mapped out a car owner’s life. Three experiences that are common to most car owners in India today — exposure to parking areas, daily commuting to & from work & exposure to outdoor branding. This led us to create a series of marketing touch points to repeatedly drill brand awareness. A consumer first sees us within his society on branded parking boards & society entrance boards, he then hears our high frequency ad on the always-on radio in his car , when in traffic, the auto in front of his car has our branding, and then, at a redlight, he notices a branded police booth & barricades on his way back from work. We map the highest office traffic roads in our cities to ensure our multi-touch point approach showed results.
For hyperlocal events, our team creates a strong calendar of events at RWAs & corporates. Not only do these help create brand awareness, consumers are happy to explore services for car problems that they had been postponing once the service brand walks up to them in their comfort zone. From 4–5 events in a month in the beginning, our team was doing upto 100 events per month per city pre-covid. Our insurance team greatly benefitted from local tie-ups with towing agencies & parking facility managers.
Every city we enter, our hyperlocal strategy results in a demand increase, higher direct searches & an overall reduction in online cost of acquisition. As consumers continue to look for hyperlocal solutions for car repair & maintenance, we continue to create hyperlocal marketing strategies to cater to them.
