Targeting can be difficult for smaller brick-and-mortar businesses. But what if there was a way to target people in a small geographic area with specific offers and messages to increase sales and foot traffic? Geofencing marketing does all this and more. We recommend incorporating this concept into your larger marketing strategy to get the most bang for your buck.
What Is Geofencing Marketing?
Geofencing marketing allows you to target groups of people based on their geographic location. This type of marketing utilizes location-based technology through GPS, Wi-Fi, radio waves, and Bluetooth. Geofencing marketing has become especially popular in recent years due to the explosion of mobile smartphone usage. This type of marketing is beneficial for businesses and can also help make your customers’ lives easier by targeting them with relevant offers and services.
Why Use Geofencing Marketing?
Geofencing marketing has become extremely lucrative in recent years and offers many benefits for businesses large and small. Here are some reasons why you should start using geofencing marketing for your business:
- Improve customer loyalty: You should never let your previous customers simply drop off the map. Instead, you need to continue to reach out to them, build a relationship, and ensure customer loyalty in the process. You can easily do this through geofencing. For example, you can send them unique offers about special events or promotions for their local store. That way, you can save money by retaining customers instead of dishing out all your cash to earn new ones.
- Improve sales: This goes hand-in-hand with improving customer loyalty. Geofencing marketing can help you improve your sales by sending out more targeted information to customers who are likely to be interested in it. Without the use of geofencing, customers could receive totally irrelevant information or offers that don’t relate to or apply to them. By focusing on your targeting through geofencing, you’re increasing the likelihood that your offer actually leads to a sale.
- Improve insights and information: Perhaps one of the best features of geofencing marketing relates to analytics. Knowledge is power, especially in the business world, and geofencing marketing allows you to fully take advantage of tons of valuable data points. For example, you can track ad impressions, conversions, visits, and more. From there, you can tweak your campaign throughout its lifetime and incorporate what you learn into your next campaign.
How to Use Geofencing Marketing?
Clearly, geofencing marketing is a worthwhile concept for those looking to grow their business. However, growth and success are never given and require time, effort, and research to achieve it.
Here are the different steps you should take to use geofencing marketing effectively:
- Know your audience: In marketing in general, it’s always important to know your audience before you actually design and launch a campaign. After all, you should be tailoring these campaigns to these specific groups of people. For example, a campaign targeting teenage girls would look quite different from a campaign targeting middle-aged men. You should nail down demographic information for your target audience, including age, gender, location, income, and education. However, it may be useful to go a step further by creating a buyer persona with more detailed information such as motivations, pain points, desires, and more. At the end of the day, you can never have too much information about your audience — so do whatever you can to learn about and connect with them.
- Set your geofence zone: Once you have your audience nailed down (including location), it’s time to set your geofence zone. In order to get the best response rate, we recommend setting a four to five-minute travel radius. That being said, it’s important to keep in mind your customers’ preferred method of travel. For example, if you’re in an urban area, then people are likely going to be walking. On the other hand, if you’re in a more suburban area, then people are likely going to be driving. Your geofence zone should vary accordingly.
- Use a clear call to action: Geofencing marketing often takes advantage of customers’ impulsivity by sending out great offers that are hard to miss out on. As a result, you need to be extremely clear with the value and call to action (CTA) within your geofenced marketing message. Provide a sense of urgency by setting a deadline to promote immediate action. Some examples include a limited-time 50% off sale, a buy-one-get-one (BOGO) deal, or a free item with purchase. In any case, make sure that your offer is valuable, worth sending out, and is something that your customers will want to receive and act on.
- Regularly review your data: As discussed above, insightful data is a key benefit of geofencing marketing. However, this is only true if you utilize it. Understandably, you may neglect this information with everything you have going on, but this is one area that you should prioritize if you want your geofencing marketing to be successful. Sometimes it doesn’t matter how great an offer you send out or how well you know your customers — your campaign just doesn’t seem to be very effective. So instead of wasting time and resources on an ineffective campaign, you can notice the signs early and take steps to remedy the situation.
Other Targeting Mechanisms to Know About
While geofencing marketing is a helpful concept, it doesn’t have to be used all on its own. Instead, we recommend utilizing other targeting mechanisms alongside geofencing marketing in order to be as effective as possible.
Here are some other targeting mechanisms to consider using with geofencing:
- Retargeting: This strategy involves targeting people who have previously interacted with your business in some way — whether it’s visiting your website or making a purchase.
- Dayparting: This strategy involves targeting people at certain times — whether it’s on a weekend morning or a weekday evening — depending on when they’re active.
- Context targeting: This strategy involves showing an ad that’s relevant to the existing content on the page to increase the likelihood that it will appeal to the viewer.
Get Help With Geofencing Marketing
With all these different targeting and marketing concepts to consider, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. Many business owners have way too many items on their plates already, so adding marketing isn’t always a realistic option. This leads many business owners to neglect this area in favor of sales, development, and client relations.
However, you don’t want to neglect marketing in general and geofencing specifically.
The good news is that you don’t have to worry about things falling through the cracks when you work with experts like Greg Gillman. Greg Gillman can help you use geofencing marketing to grow your business. He has helped big clients like Adidas, Petco, Ring, Theragun, and more generate nearly $4 billion annually in revenue — and he can help you do it too!
The Takeaway on Geofencing Marketing
As you can see, geofencing marketing is a great way to target prospects based on geographical location. With that said, it’s only effective if you do it right. If you want to ensure success in this arena and others within the marketing sphere, consult with experts like Greg Gillman, who can help you with every step along the way.
Sources:
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/347886
https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/15935-how-to-develop-a-cta.html
