Summary
Geofencing can be a challenging marketing tool, but it will certainly help once you know the ins and outs of this marketing strategy.
With so many competitors nowadays, geofencing marketing can help target your competitor’s consumers and drive more sales and traffic to your business.
Sometimes you have to be a little creative to get your message across. That’s where geofencing marketing comes in. With geofencing, you can target your audience with a simple touch of a button, and they can respond accordingly by completing a form or entering their location or contact information.
Geofencing marketing has helped me a great deal in my marketing strategy.
Let us dive deeper into its benefits and limitations, and how it works to improve our marketing.
What is Geofence Marketing?
A geofencing marketing strategy is a way to target a specific audience based on their location. This allows me to promote my brand or service by building a connection with my target customer.
Geofencing is a technology that uses location-based advertising to target users’ smartphones based on their current location. This type of advertising is local-based marketing that relies on the technologies we have today, such as Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, and RFID (radio-frequency identification)
Through the different technologies mentioned, businesses using geofencing set a perimeter based on location. The “geofence” creates an invisible barrier in that specific area. When consumers enter the “geofenced” area, location-based ads marketed by businesses will be sent to their mobile phones.
By using geofencing marketing, businesses are allowed to widen their audience reach through location-based marketing.
Using geofencing to generate ads is most useful for my business when you want to:
- Identify and understand consumers’ behavior
- Know your competitors and target their customers
- Boost and drive traffic to your local business
- Widen and engage your target audience
How does geofencing work?
Geofencing marketing is a great marketing strategy to target customers in the vicinity of your business. But how does it work? Geofencing may seem complicated and challenging at first, but it becomes simpler and easier to use once you know the basics.
In general, geofencing marketing works by:
- A company creating a geofence or virtual barriers over a specific area and then generating ads for that geofence.
- A mobile user entering that geofence and becoming one of the company’s targeted audiences for advertising.
- The mobile user starts to receive ads from the company through in-app ads and notifications or search and display ads.
If you own a company, you can put geofences in the area where your company and competitors are. In this way, Your company can also target the competitors’ customers, driving more traffic and customer engagement to your targeted ads. This is how geofencing works.
What can be a geofencing ad? A geofencing ad can be a discount promotion or simple invitation to a company’s physical location.
Companies can then deliver these geofencing ads through mobile apps, including search and display ads. The geofencing ads can also trigger in-app notifications.
Because you own the geofencing ads for your companies, you can control when the ads appear. You can choose to release the geofencing ads when foot traffic is better to drive more customer engagement.
What are the benefits of geofencing marketing?
Whether you are a small business owner, a store owner, or a marketer trying to get your company’s foot in the door with potential customers, geofencing is an important marketing strategy.
It has several benefits for marketers and business owners to target their customers based on certain geographical locations.
1. Geofencing marketing helps with local marketing.
Most people prefer physically going out of their homes to walk and browse physical shops they pass by. This is the perfect opportunity to generate targeted ads for these people.
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Because of the shift in the behavior of consumers, the potential for location-based marketing is starting to become in-demand. With geofencing marketing, the company can target a wider reach of audiences who prefer browsing shops and businesses on foot.
2. Geofencing helps in understanding consumer behavior.
Geofencing marketing can get information about consumers and their purchasing behavior in real-time. Companies can use this information to improve targeted ads and marketing strategies to attract even more customers.
This can also open up new insight into your customers’ lifestyles, habits, and interests. Geofencing can also reveal other outlets that consumers are interested in, such as billboards or rods they frequently pass by.
In return, companies can use new consumer insights to identify the best possible signage and billboard locations to place targeted ads.
3. Geofencing helps with brand awareness and consumer engagement.
Geofencing helps companies boost their exposure, raising brand awareness among the targeted audience. These kinds of ads remind customers in a geofenced area that a certain company exists.
As a result, consumers become aware of a company’s brand and specific location.
Geofencing marketing also helps boost and improve consumer engagement. You can identify what promotions, CTAs, and targeted ads work best and drive the most traffic for your online and physical stores through location-based marketing.
Based on the data you can gather from geofencing, your company is given a chance to refine and tweak your ads to drive better user engagements.
What are the limitations to geofencing marketing?
Geofencing technology also has its flaws. There can be times when a mobile device registers in a geofenced area when it should not. It’s even harder for some areas in busy locations that are not easy to measure.
Because of the possible flaws of geofencing marketing, you have to make sure that your geofencing is 100% accurate. Ads have to be as relevant and significant to your target audience as possible.
Geofencing can also have scalability issues because it is so highly targeted and in-demand with most business owners. In this case, it might be better to target a segment of consumers specifically interested in a company’s product.
Although, geofencing ads are more expensive than digital ads. You should be prepared how much geofencing marketing can cost you for a better-targeted consumer engagement.
Tips for implementing geofencing to a company’s marketing strategy
In today’s digital world, geofencing is an essential marketing strategy, especially if your company sells anything online. A geofence is a tool that makes it easier for marketers to find consumers when they search for the company or product.
How do you get started? Here are tips on how to implement and integrate geofencing marketing into the company’s marketing strategy.
Determine the Ideal Size of the Geofence
The size of a geofence determines the cost a company should pay. With geofencing marketing, larger does not mean better consumer engagement.
Customers who are far away but are included as recipients of a company’s targeted ads might not have the time to visit its physical store. As a result, the company spent geofencing money for nothing.
Establishing geofence areas with smaller perimeters is better for nearby customers to pop by your physical store and look at your promotions.
Some of the target locations you can geofence include:
- Where your physical location is
- The location of your competitors
- Streets and roads nearby to your location
- Trade shows and event places
Know your audience
Knowing and understanding your target audience is the key to driving better results for your company. Learn about their demographic and preferences to know how you can improve on targeted ads.
When you understand how your audiences think, you can improve your marketing strategies to ensure relevance to your target audience.
Promote Actionable Ads
You can’t just highlight your services or what you sell. Since they are targeted audiences, more or less they already know what your business is about.
Instead, create discount promotions for in-store purchases and reward points to encourage your audience to purchase something from your business. Through these actionable ads, you give consumers a reason to purchase something and visit your stores again.
Don’t forget to include a compelling CTA.
A compelling CTA can often help you seal the deal. Some of the most compelling CTAs include:
- Click here
- Shop now
- Order here
- Learn more
- Buy now
How to track geofencing marketing campaigns?
Tracking KPIs and other metrics can help you determine whether the geofencing marketing campaigns were a success or not. Some of the metrics that you need to gauge include:
- Ad Impressions or Ad Views – number of times ads are seen
- CTR or Click-through rate – number of clicks ads have received per number of impressions
- CPC or Cost per Click – the highest amount you pay for a click on your ads
- Cost per Visit – total number of visits to your stores over the total cost of your marketing efforts
- Cost per Action – the amount you pay to generate conversion
- Walk-in Rate – the percentage of people who come in and visit your store
Final Say
Geofencing marketing can be a helpful tool in driving traffic to your business. Knowing your target audience and generating ads for them will help you improve on marketing strategies and boost your sales.
You can generate geofencing marketing campaigns for your brands to increase sales and become a successful business owner with the proper steps.
Let me know in the comments below whether you have tried geofencing marketing and how it helped your business.
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