Introduction to Geofencing Marketing
Have you ever heard of geofencing marketing? As a marketing professional or a business owner you may have heard of this advertising technique.
Understanding what geofencing marketing really is, can help you to incorporate it into your outreach strategy.
Are you looking to take a much more targeted approach to your advertising? If you’re still casting a generic ‘wide net’ to capture as many marketing streams as possible, you could be spending more money than is necessary. Advanced marketing tools and tactics can help your organisation to tailor your marketing approach, learn what is working best and deliver your content straight into the hands of those who need it.
One highly effective technique is Geofencing Marketing. Don’t worry it isn’t as complicated as it sounds! With the right tools, and the right strategy, it’s actually a pretty simple, but extremely effective way to reach your customers – both existing and new ones.
Let’s dive right in, to how you can use this particular strategy to promote your brand, track your results, produce a higher ROI, and optimise all of your efforts, to create more effective advertising campaigns.
What is Geofencing Marketing?
You may have heard of geocaching, well geofencing marketing is a type of location-based marketing that targets customers where they are, by drawing a virtual boundary around a specific location. Once this boundary has been drawn, it then delivers targeted mobile display ads to people who move in and out of that particular location or region. For example, if you want to target the west side of London, your geofencing marketing location would be there and people moving in and out of the west of London will be able to pick up your targeted adverts.
How Does it Work?
For more detail on how it works click here for our Complete Guide to Geofencing.
Or read on to learn about the benefits and an overview on how to run an effective campaign.
Create your target zone
The first thing to do is to draw a digital GPS Boundary around a specific location. Determining the right location is important, so think about your audience first. You can only create your target zone when you create your buyer persona. Who is your audience? Where are they spending the time? Which events do they attend? It is vital that you choose a location where you can guarantee your target audience will spend their time. This way, your budget will be well-placed.
You should consider whether you would use traveller targeting, competitive targeting, addressable targeting – which shows ads to people in a specific neighbourhood. Each of these has their own niche within a niche. Competitor targeting, for example, shows ads to people who visit your main competition and so gives you the chance to poach them.
Develop your message
For your Geofencing strategy to work, you need to develop a strategic message for your advertising content. What is the message you would like to share with your audience? The buyer persona that we mentioned earlier on will matter here. If you can understand the messages that resonate with your audience in those targeted locations, you will be able to give your audience the information they require. Which message would be the one to help them to take action? This is for you to produce. You can even choose whether you want to display your message as a static display, or a video ad. Again, this will depend on your brand and buyer persona.
Drive action
With your message to your audience, you need to add a call to action. This will tell your audience what you want them to do. For example, a box that asks people to input the email address for an email newsletter update is a clear indication of what you would like your audience to do with the page they are on.
You can use Geofencing Marketing to drive either online or in person action.
To drive action, you need to have a better understanding of your business goals. When you know what you want for your business, you will be able to prompt your audience to make the right choice.
Ask your audience to click on a link, or make an online purchase, or you can drive in person actions by asking them to visit your business with a coupon code that you have sent them.
Use your analytics
Monitoring the results of your campaigns by tracking conversions will help you to understand whether your campaign is successful enough. Tracking online conversions to measure the number of purchases will help you to ascertain whether you are spending your marketing budget in the right places. You can even track off-line conversions by setting up conversion zones by tagging the people who see your advert.
Benefits of Geofencing Marketing
You can create strategic messaging and use conversion tracking to monitor your success.
Boost mobile marketing effectiveness:
Ninety-one percent (91%) of adults keep their smartphones within arm’s reach as reported by Forbes. Geofencing marketing taps into mobile marketing by getting your message in front of the right audiences while they are on their phone.
Hypertargeting:
By using precision targeting to reach customers, based on specific criteria, this allows your message to get in front of your ideal audience, without spending money reaching audiences who are not likely to be interested in your ads.
Collect tangible results and customer data:
With geofencing, you can track impressions, clicks, and even offline conversions making it easy for you to collect data, see actual results, and gather information to optimise future campaigns. Access detailed analytics to gives your organisation access to a wealth of audience insights. For instance, with Mobile Geofence/GeoFollow, you can track interactions with your digital ads and measure how many prospects convert from those ads. With Addressable Geofence, you can gather individual data on audience members, such as identifying matched households. These details can help you determine how you will craft your future ad campaigns.
High return on investment:
With this focused approach, compared to broad location targeting, you only pay to reach a specific group of users and get the most out of your ad spend. Our customers typically see a 100% return on ad spend.
Improve your local marketing efforts:
Connect with your local community by using area events to market your (or your client’s) business. Services such as Mobile Geofence or Venue Replay can help you access local audience members whom you may want to reach. For example, if you’re interested in expanding your business to a new location, you can reach audience members in that new area to start promoting your brand and raising awareness of your expansion.
Build brand awareness:
In the non-profit marketing world, it can take up to 18-20 different touchpoints to reach a new donor for the first time. In the for-profit sector, it takes an average of 8-10 touches before prospective customers feel inclined to make a purchase or enquiry.
No matter the industry, geofencing marketing can help increase the number of touchpoints between your organisation and its prospective audience members by supplementing your direct mail marketing with digital outreach. Connect with prospective audience members or customers using highly relevant and timely ads.
Let’s say your business sells customised business card holders. Your local chamber of commerce is hosting a conference for community business leaders to mingle, share updates, and make connections. Who has a greater use for a business card holder than someone who attends business conferences? By using the Mobile Geofence service, you can use digital ads to promote your business card holders to conference attendees, serving them a highly relevant ad that they’re more likely to actually click.
How To Use Geofencing Marketing Effectively
Here are our top tips to help you to design the most effective marketing strategy for Geofencing:
- Get to know your target audience
- Work on optimising your content or offer
- Track your progress
- Define your success factors
- Organise your data
Who Needs Geofencing Marketing?
If this is the first time that you are hearing about Geofencing marketing campaigns, you’re not alone. It’s primarily used by brick-and-mortar businesses in the hospitality, healthcare and retail industries. However, this is not limited to those industries, and pretty much any business, large and small, can use these amazing methods of targeting in their current marketing plan.
Have you already assessed your buyer persona? Know where your ideal customer spends their time? It’s time to turn on your geofencing marketing strategies!
Start a campaign by considering which strategy can work for your specific audience and your goals, here are a few examples:
- Work on building loyalty: Less expensive than gaining new customers, working on brand loyalty from your existing customers encourages them to come back again and again. Tagging customers when they come to your store and then delivering a great offer or something that they are looking for, means your brand will be front of mind and they will keep talking about you.
- Geofence your business: One of the best ways to attract nearby customers and bring more foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar business is to set a fence around your business. When customers walk past, they are then targeted with ads that encourage them to visit.
- Aim for the competition: One of the best things in your business is to ensure that you talk to your competitors’ customers. Pulling customers from the other side is one of the biggest achievements you could have in your business, so put your adverts in front of people who could be potential customers for your business by geofencing your competitor locations.
Optimisation
The last and possibly most crucial point to consider, is that you should continually optimise any live campaign to drive better results in future. Here are some things to consider:
- Adjust your messages and design, to see which ones resonate strongly with audiences
- Optimise your target zones by turning off the lowest performing areas and testing brand-new regions
- Identify the times when you convert at the highest rate
How to Get Started
Fluid Ads Geofencing Ads functionality is a powerful yet simple part of our Ad platform, allowing you to target customers in a specific physical location or multiple locations. We offer a DIY or fully managed service.
DIY Option – If you want to deploy your own tactics, simply set up an account with Fluid Ads today. Start by signing into the platform, and our self-serve team will be on hand to help you onboard.
Managed Service – Chat with the experts at Fluid Ads to discuss your marketing strategies. Use the button below to book a demo.