Do you want to promote your products and services in a specific area of interest? Do you want that the promotion campaigns run by your company would be seen in the nearby area where your physical store is situated?
Do you think it’s possible?
Of course, it’s possible!
Geofencing marketing is the solution to this problem. It can help in targeting the right audience in your area of interest. With the help of it, you can decide in which location your paid ads should be shown. It also saves unnecessary ad spending and optimizes the budget along with attracting more visitors to the brick-and-mortar location.
Let’s understand what geofencing is more elaborately to implement it more precisely.
What is Geofencing?
Geofencing = Geo + Fencing
Geofencing is the combination of two words geo and fencing, in which geo means “Geographical or locations” and Fencing means “to define the perimeter.”
In simple words, Geofencing can define perimeters surrounding particular areas of interest.
These perimeters are also referred to as Geofences. Geofencing provide a contextual user experience while entering and leaving an area of interest.
I hope you’ve understood what Geofencing is, now let’s move ahead and get to know about its use and applications.
Uses and Applications of Geofencing
Geofencing is being used in several areas nowadays. It’s a popular and powerful technique for brick-and-mortar businesses to drive consumers to their physical stores. There are so many other uses and applications of it for plenty of businesses. Some of the uses and applications of Geofencing are in the following fields;
- Market Research: It helps in market research like knowing where customers are spending their time the most, and where they’re going, and what types of people we can target based on demographic & psychographic data.
- Security: In security geofencing location and distance work together to define a fence around a specific point. It’s used in sound systems, smart home security systems, alarm systems and GPS tracking of kids.
- Tracking Animals: It is also very useful in tracking animals, and most of the time it is used for dangerous animals to keep an eye on them and keep away from populated areas. For example, it is used in Tiger Reserves to track tigers by setting a tracker in their collar.
- Law Enforcement: After issuing a warrant law enforcement can compel the Technology Company to disclose the anonymized location records for any devices to track suspects and criminals in certain areas during a specific time period.
- Drone Management: Drones are being used for film shooting and making videos the most. Geofencing helps drones in pinpointing on maps and ensuring it doesn’t leave the said geofenced area.
- Social Networking: Social media applications use geofenced to filter the audience based on locations. Once you set up the filter you’ll see the posts only from your areas of interest.
- Marketing: It is being used as a popular marketing tool nowadays to target users from a specific area of interest. Applications are websites are using it to send alert notifications to the user who’ve entered a geofenced location setup by brick-and-mortar brands.
- Audience Engagement: It is being used for increasing engagement for organized events like concerts, official festivals, and fairs by sharing a social media post for crowdsourcing using geofence to deliver the information about the venue in a particular area of interest. Thus, the information would be distributed only to that specific area of interest.
- Telematics: Telematics departments also use geofencing technology to alert their employees if they cross the geofenced virtual zones around sites, work areas and secure areas drawn by companies.
- Human Resources: Human resource departments in companies are also using geofence technology for monitoring employees and automating clocking their entry and exit timing.
We’ve seen how dynamically geofencing can be used for businesses in different areas. How do you want to use geofencing for your business?
We’ve also discussed that geofencing is being used in marketing also. So, first, let’s discuss what is geofencing marketing?
What is Geofencing Marketing?
Targeting potential consumers based on their geographical location is called Geofencing Marketing.
It is mostly used for physical locations. Businesses that’ve brick-and-mortar stores like restaurants, retail stores, service providers, cafes, and booksellers invest in geofencing marketing.
Geofencing marketing was already there its popularity has increased so much along with the rise of smartphone users. There are three ways of tracking a consumer’s location in it; GPS, Bluetooth, and Beacons.
Likewise, we can also target consumers in three ways; geotargeting, geofencing, and beaconing.
To begin with, Geotargeting is used for delivering targeted ads based on the given location. In addition, beaconing is used for delivering targeted information or messages to nearby mobile devices. Furthermore, geofencing draws a virtual perimeter and delivers targeted messages within this virtual perimeter.
I hope, you’ve now understood the different targeting techniques with the help of locations. Geofencing can be used on any device from mobile to desktop and laptops. Let’s move ahead to know how geofencing marketing work?
How does Geofencing Marketing work?
The Geofencing API use built-in device sensors. With the help of these sensors, applications can accurately detect the location of the device with efficient battery consumption.
It is based on the location feature data of smartphone of users. While running promotional ads if we want to use Geofencing then we need to run ads based on the potential target consumer’s location. Ads can be shown either based on the specific location or can be based on the specific location radius. In a specific location, it’ll cover all the people in that particular location, but in a specific radius location, the coverage area would be a circle of the given radius.
Eg. when we run FB ads for DigiAvtar we select Gurugram first, then it asks us if we want to target circularly then we select a radius like 5km, or 25km then it targets all the users in a circular pinpointing the specific location as a centre. We can also select Gurugram only and move ahead without targeting a circular area.
Do you know Facebook, Instagram, and Google Adwords support Geofencing at no additional charges?
Location data is so much important to work with Geofencing marketing techniques and this data can be collected from a number of sources such as Bluetooth, GPS and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).
After getting the data the users can be targeted through
- Alert Messages
- Push Notifications
- Targeted Advertising on Social Media
- Websites
- Mobile Applications of stores
- Targeted Advertising on Search Engines
You can see how we can target users through different types of mediums. Hence, Geofencing marketing is very effective for brands with a physical store. The GeoFence can be of any width and length from a home to a mile or a building to a pin code or any circular area. This way optimising the areas of interest, it’s so much value in reducing ad spend, and boosting your ROI.
How GeoFencing Helps Local Business?
Geofencing Marketing Strategy can give an uplift to the local businesses marketing campaigns as well as personalized marketing campaigns as we’ve already discussed Geofencing is all about targeting consumers and sending them alerts when they’re near a particular local store.
The consumers hear chimes on their mobile phones about the particular store when they’re nearby it, there are better chances that consumers will pay a visit to your brick-and-mortar store. So, it helps in increasing store visits.
We’ve seen how Geofencing helps local business marketing campaigns by increasing store visits.
In the same way, it helps personalized marketing campaigns by providing consumers with an alert or notifications when they’re near the store. An alert can make them feel valuable and grateful to the business.
Many studies and researches have been conducted on GeoFencing Marketing, and they tell incredible things about it;
- 75 % means 3 out of 4 users make a purchase from a nearby store after hearing alerts
- 92% of smartphones are compatible with it out of 7.1 billion smartphones. We know Geofencing is based on location data, and the mobile phone is the device we keep ourselves every single moment. You can see how bigger a target audience you’ve.
- Each user spends at least 5 hours a day on their mobile device and it’s bigger than any other device.
- Geofencing Mobile Advertising has a Double Click-through Rate.
- 71% of consumers prefer Personalized Advertising
You have seen how people are believing that this strategy is improving the shopping experience. It’s consisting the values of both local business marketing and personalized marketing.
Now, let’s discuss the benefits of GeoFencing Marketing
Benefits of Geofencing Marketing
I’m sure you’ve gotten an idea of how valuable this marketing strategy is from the discussion we’ve done so far. Now, let’s discuss its benefits of it;
- Better and Specific Targeting
- Personalized User Experience
- Limiting Wasted Ad Spend
- Can be Combined with another Strategy Well
- Increased Efficiency with Less Cost
- Expanded reach being Mobile Centric
- Track Behaviour and Demographics
- Easy and Better Tracking of Employees
- Generates More Revenue with less expenditure
If you also want to get these benefits from this strategy then go and start implementing it from now on. I’m sure you’ll wonder if you do it properly.
You must be thinking about the brands who’re currently using it and getting benefits from it. Well, there are not one or two brands, but many who are using this tactic to grow their business and provide a better user experience.
Examples of Geofencing Marketing
Geofencing marketing is used everywhere where we need location data to trigger something. We can see how big brands have incorporated it into their system for giving a customised and personalized experience to their users.
- Uber
- Ola
- BMW’s Electrical Vehicles
- Google Maps
- Apple Maps
Are you thinking if they can do it for their business, then why can’t you do it for your business?
Of course, you can do it!
Move ahead and make the best out of it!
Wrapping Up
We’ve included everything about Geofencing Marketing in this blog. Now you know what it is, how it works, examples, benefits and so much more. It is an effective and cost-effective way of attracting target potential customers to the physical location. With the help of its filter feature, we can filter out customers and decrease our ad spend while increasing the efficiency of the advertising.
Marketers are using geofencing marketing through different mediums like sending in-app notifications in brand mobile applications, sending text messages after entering geofenced areas, social media ads, web ads etc.
Some tips we need to remember while implementing it are; limiting the scope, keeping a clear call to action, targeting the right audience and area, and coupling it with another marketing strategy.
As everyone knows no business can be dependent on just one marketing strategy. That’s why we also need to couple this marketing tactic with other marketing strategies. We can mix other marketing strategies with it like local business marketing, personalized marketing, Facebook Marketing, Content Marketing, Remarketing, Search Engine Advertising or Paid Promotions.
Thinking to make Geofencing part of your marketing Strategies? Have questions?
Drop us a comment below!
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