Sending an email to all your customers in the Pacific Northwest announcing a one-day training event may be simple enough, assuming you already have geographic data for your existing customers. But how do you present a geo-relevant web page to anonymous web leads and prospects?

Well, there are a couple options. There are database companies (like ip2location) that take a best guess at where anonymous web visitors are physically located based on their Internet Address. This is really the best option for public pages handling organic leads that cannot assume where the visit is coming from.

The other option is to utilize the geographic targeting capabilities of PPC advertising engines, such as Google's AdWords campaign manager (see screen shot below).

These tools allow marketers to target customers by location and direct them to geographically relevant web pages.

This is an extremely important facet of Internet marketing that must not be overlooked. It really pains me to do a Google search on something like "transmission repair" and see pay-per-click AdWords along the right side for businesses like "Bob's Transmission Repair Shop" in North Carolina.

Clearly Bob is not interested in attracting International business and will likely burn through his daily advertising budget is less than 2 hours unless the ad can be geographically targeted to only IP addresses in North Carolina.