Geofencing Marketing is one of the most powerful ways to spend your advertising dollars wisely.
As you know, it’s more important than ever to stay ahead of the curve in our world of ever changing and ever advancing marketing technology. You need to use every tool at your disposal to optimize your marketing messages and to whom those message are going. However, as with all marketing ventures, budget is definitely an ongoing consideration. To help you overcome these obstacles, there is now available, a tool that is at the head of the pack for increasing ROI. It’s called Geofencing Marketing, and it’s one of the most robust tools available today when it comes to helping businesses generate quality leads. By utilizing Geofencing Marketing, businesses can stay ahead of the competition and get targeted leads that are more likely to convert into customers.
What is Geofencing Marketing?
At its most basic, Geofencing Marketing is a type of programmatic advertising that uses GPS or RFID technology to create a virtual fence around a physical location. Based on the power of location-enabled devices, when a potential customer and their mobile device enters the geofenced area, they will receive targeted advertisements from the businesses on their mobile device(s). The advertisements can be text messages, push notifications, video, gif, or banner ads. They are seen via the millions of websites and hundreds of thousands of mobile apps that support and participate in online advertising. You can think of this as advanced Mobile Advertising (though this functionality applies to all applicable mobile devices) if you’d like. Advanced, because it is so much more than the search and pay-per-click (ppc) advertising you’re familiar with.
Only by focusing on the precision of your audience building and targeting can you improve the overall outcome of your marketing efforts.
What does Location Enabled Device Mean?
Simply put, location enabled devices are any devices that have enabled the GPS functionality on their mobile devices. These devices include smart phones, tablets, laptops, and even some cars. By enabling this function, consumers are able to benefit from services that require the use of GPS functionality, such as navigation and fitness tools. Each of these devices has something called a device ID and it is the device ID that allows for that specific device to receive information particular and unique to that device owner.
Here is an example of Geofencing Marketing in action:
Imagine you own a car dealership and you sell Nissans. Down the street is a Toyota dealership, and you want the customers visiting that dealership to receive ads about your dealership. This is a very viable use case. These are active shoppers who have a confirmed interest in buying a vehicle. That’s the perfect audience for your advertising budget in this example.
To set up this geofence around the Toyota dealership, you, the Nissan dealer, would need to define the boundary of a geofence (in this instance, it would be the GPS coordinates of the Toyota dealership). Once the geofence is defined/created, you would then use programmatic advertising to deliver targeted ads, that you created, to those consumers who are within the geofenced area (the Toyota dealership). In other words, a person with a smart phone and location services enabled, will trigger the advertising you set up, once they cross the virtual geographic boundary you created around that Toyota dealership.
Geofencing Marketing is most notable for targeting potential customers who are near physical locations, such as stores or office buildings, but they can also be created around virtual locations, such as website URLs or social media accounts. Additionally, geofencing can be used to collect data on customer behavior and patterns, store user data for at least 30 days, and can also be used in conjunction with other marketing tools and strategies, such as behavioral targeting and retargeting.
It is worth noting to those who may get confused, geofencing and geotargeting are not the same thing. Geotargeting is a strategy that focuses on delivering content based on a geographical boundary. Whereas Geofencing Marketing is a highly precise marketing technology that relies on GPS and programmatic advertising technology to target and retarget prospects.
As the above example and definition of Geofencing Marketing implies, Geofencing Marketing provides insights that help advertisers to be more precise in whom they advertise to. By being able to sell to the right audience, based on the right data, at the right time, it signifies, that ultimately, you will enjoy more bang for your advertising buck. It is always a win when you can maximize marketing spend and increase ROI.
To shine a light for a moment on Programmatic Advertising, it will be helpful to note that it isn’t actually something you have to program. It is a way (via an advertising marketing service and their proprietary dashboard) that advertisers and publishers have created to better organize, buy and sell, and better place ads. It’s where all the aspects of your online marketing strategy, your entire game plan, will play out in, real-time.
It may seem, at this point, that digital advertising is now a lot more complicated and diverse than just buying ads on Google Ads or Facebook. Maybe too much trouble if you will. It may be more complicated, but not too much trouble.
For, with this extra bit of complication, comes a whole lot of new opportunity.
Now, digital advertising is able to capture behavior activity and data, cross reference that with demographic information, and then apply Geofencing Marketing/Programmatic Advertising, to provide for more precise advertising than ever. This means more money – more sales – more customers.
Ultimately, the power comes from truly understanding the digital and physical journey and activity of your prospects. Where they’ve been will indicate what they are interested in. What they have clicked on, also will indicate what they are interested in. When the buy things, this indicates what they are interested in. This data will help you close more sales.
Now, back to using your imagination. Imagine now, with all these available technologies, if you wanted to, you could create and strategize a marketing campaign around this audience:
“college students, who are women, under the age of 21, who are interested in buying a car, in the Toronto area, and who have searched for a car in the last 15 days, while having visited at least one car dealership within the last 15 days.”
Targeting this unique audience is kind of basic when compared to what many businesses are doing to target and retarget customers, especially when they utilize AI to help facilitate their results.
Geofencing Marketing is good for:
- Digital Advertising
- Online Branding
- Targeting and Retargeting
- Competitor Conquesting
- Event and Conference Targeting
- Personalized Messaging
- Recapturing Lost Sales
- Customer Loyalty Programs
In addition, this technology seems like the new-kid-on-the-block, but it’s not. Geofencing Marketing is immensely popular and has been for some time. As a matter of fact, the Geofencing Marketing sector is expected to grow dramatically in the U.S., rising from $1,867.2 Mn in 2022, to $9,596.6 in 2032.
Here are some additional Geofencing Marketing statistics and data worth noting:
- 95% of companies worldwide use Geofencing Marketing (source)
- Geofencing is compatible with 92% of smartphones (source)
- 3 out of 4 consumers complete an action after receiving a message when approaching a specific location (source)
- 53% of shoppers visited a retailer after receiving a location-based message (source)
- Mobile ads with geofencing have double the click-through rate of non-geofencing ads (USPS)
Geofencing Marketing also pairs very well with content marketing. Remember, another goal with marketing today, is to provide for very personalized delivery.
In conclusion, by incorporating Geofencing Marketing into your marketing strategy you will:
- Drive more leads
- Elicit more engagement
- Increase brand awareness
If you’re not using Geofencing Marketing, it is time to seriously reconsider that position as it is most likely being used by your competition.