Geofencing advertising is a powerful marketing strategy that allows businesses to target consumers based on their geographic location. By setting up virtual boundaries known as geofences, companies can deliver relevant ads to potential customers when they enter or exit specific locations.
However, like any marketing tool, there are certain dos and don’ts that businesses need to be aware of to maximize the effectiveness of geofence advertising campaigns. In this blog post, we will explore some crucial guidelines for successful geofencing advertising.
How to Get Started with Geofencing?
Geofencing may seem complicated for a beginner, but it is easier in reality. This strategy requires a combination of a set of technologies, such as GPS, mobile networks, and Wifi, to establish a virtual boundary that targets audiences that come within the radius.
The key to implementing a successful geofencing strategy is to understand the existing elements of your marketing tactic and incorporate them into an effective location-based marketing strategy. To get started with geofencing, you must be aware of the following things:
1. Your customer’s demography
Before you implement a geofencing strategy, you must clearly understand your customer’s demography and the local audience that your business caters to. Understanding the demography ensures that your efforts don’t go to waste and you are achieving the results that the strategy is aiming for.
2. Having a closed fence
Having a geo fence that is too large may seem like a good idea in theory, but it doesn’t benefit your business in reality. As a rule of thumb, the Geofence should be within four to five minutes of walking/ driving distance, depending on what the residents prefer as a mode of transportation. So, if you have a physical store, ensure the Geofence is within the distance mentioned.
3. Add an Immediate CTA
The goal of setting a geofence is to encourage your audience to visit your store. For this, you need to add a CTA that creates a sense of urgency in their mind. For example, you can entice them with “limited offers” or “offers valid today,” which will make them visit your store if they are nearby.
Why Should You Consider Geofencing for Your Business?
1. You can target a specific group of audience:
Geofencing helps you connect with the local audience. This form of marketing is one of the most effective strategies in digital marketing if you have a physical store and want to connect with people who live nearby.
Geo fence marketing helps the audience relate to your brand, and as a result, you are also able to establish a connection with the local community and lifestyle, which improves your brand image. For example, if you own a restaurant, you can send your customers messages about interesting offers or special dishes you are serving this weekend to encourage them to visit.
2. Customers are most likely to do business with your brand
For any store with a physical location, in-foot customers are the backbone of the business. With geofencing, you cultivate a loyal local following that stays true to your business and trusts your services. This way, if you run a retail store, you can expand your retail location as your local followers increase.
3. Helps you stay on top of your audience’s mind
With so many competitors eyeing your customers, your marketing strategy must enable you to stay on top of their minds. With geofencing, even though they may not be ready to make a purchase immediately, you will be their first choice whenever they decide to buy a product that your business deals with.
By messaging your previous or prospective customers at regular intervals, you can establish yourself as an indispensable leader in your field and become their preferred choice.
4. It is cheap and effective
Most people think that geofencing is very expensive, but the opposite is true, especially considering the number of leads that geofencing generates. If you use platforms like Google Adwords, half of your job is done.
Google allows you to set location-based paid ads for your audience at no extra cost. You can enable paid ads to appear on a particular territory or radius based on your preference.
5. Geofence helps gather valuable data
When you use a marketing strategy that focuses on people within a small radius, you are able to gather more valuable and accurate data about the audience. This helps you enhance your marketing efforts through data accumulated from their response to the message, the amount of time and money spent, consumer behavior, and much more.
What You Should Do
1. Develop Clear Objectives
Before implementing a geofence advertising campaign, it is essential to define your goals. Decide what you want to achieve through geofencing – whether it’s driving foot traffic to your store, increasing brand awareness, or generating leads. Clear objectives will help you tailor your ad content and targeting strategies accordingly.
2. Define Relevant Geographical Boundaries
Take the time to identify the most relevant geographical boundaries for your business. It could be around your physical store, competitor locations, events relevant to your target audience, or high-traffic areas where you can capture consumer attention effectively. Understanding your target market’s habits and preferences will enable you to select the optimal locations for placing geofences.
3. Segment Your Audience
Not every consumer within a geofenced area will have the same interests or purchasing behavior. Therefore, segmenting your audience based on demographics such as age, gender, income level, or lifestyle preferences is crucial for crafting personalized ads that resonate with each group individually. A targeted approach drives better engagement and conversion rates.
4. Create Compelling Ad Content
To catch the attention of potential customers entering or within a geofenced area, ensure that your ad content is engaging and tailored specifically for them. Use persuasive language highlighting exclusive offers, limited-time promotions, or other incentives designed to entice the audience to act. Incorporate strong call-to-action buttons or links directing them to your website or physical store.
5. Test and Optimize
Like any marketing technique, geofencing advertising requires continuous evaluation and fine-tuning. Monitor the performance of your campaigns using analytics tools and collect data on click-through rates, conversions, and other metrics to gain valuable insights into what works and what doesn’t. Use this information to refine your ad targeting, content, and placements for optimum results.
What You Shouldn’t Do
1. Overwhelm Customers with Ads
While geofencing advertising offers immense potential, bombarding consumers with an excessive number of ads can lead to annoyance or even distaste for your brand. Remember that less is often more when it comes to digital advertising. Be selective about the frequency and timing of your ads to avoid overwhelming potential customers.
2. Neglect Privacy Concerns
Respect user privacy when implementing geofencing campaigns by clearly stating your data collection practices and obtaining consent where necessary. Make sure you comply with privacy regulations while collecting and analyzing location data from users who opt-in to receive your targeted advertisements.
3. Rely Solely on Geofencing
Geofencing advertising should not be treated as a standalone marketing strategy. Integrating it with other tactics, such as social media marketing, email campaigns, or search engine optimization, will create a cohesive approach that enhances the effectiveness of each channel.
4. Ignore Analytics Data
To make informed decisions about your geofencing campaigns, continuously monitor and analyze performance metrics using appropriate analytic tools without neglecting other available sources of information such as customer feedback or market research. Ignoring valuable insights can hinder campaign improvements and growth opportunities.
5. Alienating Local Customers
Sometimes, when businesses implement geofencing strategies targeted at out-of-town visitors, they may unknowingly alienate their most loyal customers – locals who frequent their establishment regularly.
Understandably, local customers are just as important, if not more, in driving revenue and promoting a positive perception or “hype” about local businesses, hence why geofencing these customers takes relevance.
Effective Geofencing Marketing Tactics
Now that you know about the dos and don’ts of geofencing, let us look at how you can make your efforts more effective:
1. Set location-based offers
Location-based offers are a great way to entice customers to visit your store. Even though this strategy doesn’t guarantee conversion, it improves offline store traffic.
For instance, if you have a restaurant in a heavy-traffic area. You can use geofencing to send notifications about special discounts that are available during rush hour to entice customers to enter your store.
2. Aiming for competitor’s customers
In this tactic, you aim for your competitor’s customers by establishing a geo fence in their area. The goal here is to establish that you are better than your competitors, so their prospective customers must choose you over them. In this strategy, you can send your target audience messages hinting that you are better than your competitors through better discounts, more inventories, or emphasis on better customer reviews.
3. Nurture a loyal customer base
A major problem that large companies face is a lack of personalized connections with their customer base. However, with geofencing, businesses can ensure that their customers remain loyal to their business and stay long-term loyal followers. Setting a geofence encourages your customers to sign up for loyalty programs, social media notifications, and much more.
Conclusion
When used correctly, geofencing advertising can be a great way to get unique messages to a very specific group of people at key times.
Companies can make sure their geofencing campaigns are successful by following these dos and avoiding the related don’ts. Remember to be clear about your goals, pick your geographic boundaries carefully, create interesting ad content, divide your audience into groups, try and improve your ads often, and most importantly, plan your ads well while protecting users’ privacy.
In this modern digital world, doing so will improve the general performance of your geofencing efforts and raise your chances of marketing success.
