Geofencing is not a new concept in marketing. Of course, the technology of geofence has been around but with recent competitiveness recently retailers, business people, and marketers are clinging to find new ways that they should be working on to gain more profit.
However, as technology continues to evolve and upgrade with each assigned day, marketers are now trying to discover and implement innovative new ways to their marketing campaigns to make them a success.
For all the first-time hearers of geofencing, you may be wondering what it is and how it can get your businesses more sales and overall lead conversions.
What exactly is Geofencing?
Geofencing is a service based on the location where the application uses the RFID (Radio-frequency identification), Wi-Fi, GPS, or mobile data to initiate audience targeting activity via text, email, social media ad, app notification, whenever a mobile device or RFID tag enters the geo boundary, as we call as a geofence.
This marketing activity can help you track a buyer’s location via GPS, Bluetooth, and Telecom network, and there are three ways to use this technology to identify and target customers for promotional purposes: geotargeting, geofencing, and beaconing (branding).
Geotargeting is more focused on delivering targeted advertising to users depending on their location, whereas beaconing focuses on conveying targeted messages and information to nearby mobile devices, geofencing focuses on the visual perimeter that a marketer builds around a specific location to deliver the targeted messages.
Via geofencing, there are few different ways of alerts you can send whenever the audience enters the target zone. The most popular types of alerts include text messages, in-app push notifications, and social media advertisements.
How does Geofencing Works in the Real World?
Simply put, geofencing is a form of location-based marketing and advertising that follows the steps like:
Identify the radius that surrounds the physical store in the area present
Setting up the geofence, as a virtual barrier, to limit the space you want to target the customer whenever it enters the zone.
Whenever a device like a mobile phone, comes in or out of the zone, the event may be triggered as a notification by the app to notify the user about your store, featured products, or flash sales in an effort to get them attracted to your brand.
However, with the advancement of technology and marketing methods, geofencing is now able to go beyond just short-term marketing and can instead be used to identify, build, and retain more audiences.
The marketing aspect of this approach occurs when people break a barrier and enter a designated area. When the border is broken, the geofenced campaign can be removed and redirected by messages depending on the data collected and the data provided.
But this leads us to the most important questions that need to be answered, namely what is the use of geofencing in marketing to improve conversion and how accurate is geofencing when used in real-world conditions?
How is geofencing used in various industries?
Geofencing can be used in many different ways. Here are some examples of how retailers in various industries are already getting benefited from geofencing:
Retail Industry: Sending promotional messages as customers pass by the store and attract them to visit.
Automobile industry: Retarget the users who recently visited your car dealership center or any of your competitor’s store
Coupons: To improve the ROI, provide coupons using geofencing is a great way to lure them to visit the store and compels them to make the purchase.
Hospitality: The hospitality industry is the biggest beneficiary of geofencing. As they can easily find new customers and ask them for reviews once they leave the geofence.
Food Reviews: Using geofence you can suggest a popular dish of the area whenever the audience passes by the restaurant
Geofencing Campaign Tips
You can take inspirations from certain marketing firms and businesses who are using the geofence, we will also leave you with some simple tips to follow when it comes to building your geofencing campaigns:
- Collect as much data as possible prior to starting the marketing campaign.
- Identify specific users within your geofence unlike everyone who logs in to it
- Connect your brick and mortar store location with an online user profile, by taking reference of their wishlist, previous purchases recommended products, etc.
- Use it to promote limited offer sales that can interest major audiences to visit your store.
- Keep exploring and changing your online marketing activities and posts. It needs to be kept up-to-date and accurate
- Be creative with your messages, this is a great way to stand out from the competitors and gain more consumers.
A well-directed and planned geofencing campaign is one of the most effective ways to build a loyal, local customer base that engages with your business. By using this strategy, you can stay one step ahead of the competitors and drive conversions in ways that you previously haven’t tried.
If geofencing is not part of your marketing campaigns, as a digital marketing company we recommend you to include this strategy in your marketing campaign.
