A good marketing strategy focuses on staying relevant to your consumers. When trying to stay relevant, location can be key. One way to leverage location is through a technique known as geofencing. Geofencing is the use of GPS or RFID technology to create a virtualized geographic border that allows the software to respond when a mobile device enters or leaves a certain area. A geofence can send mobile push alerts, SMS messages, or warnings, target social media advertising, track car fleets, disable specific technologies, or provide location-based marketing data, depending on how it's set up.
Geofence hardware and software have been around for decades, but they have always been expensive. Supply was first restricted to military purposes but that soon changed. The livestock sector was the first to use it commercially. Cattle were tagged with GPS locators by ranchers. They could then see where they were grazing by pressing a few buttons. It saved them the physical effort of going out to look for the cattle and assisted them in locating the ones that had wandered away from the herd. The transportation industry soon adopted the same technology. Fleet headquarters could locate any eighteen-wheelers at any time of day or night by then. Trucking businesses enhanced their distribution and revenue overnight in an industry with so many moving components.
The future of geofencing is the world of small businesses. Think about the possibilities!
Locals make up the majority of your company if you own a physical store. That means mobile marketing, which targets people in your city and adjacent areas, is the best use of your money. You can target your advertising to customers who live or work in specific areas (such as Silicon Valley or the East Coast). It can transform a successful campaign into a world-record-breaking campaign.
Benefits of Geofencing for Small Businesses
Attract Customers
Geofencing provides adverts, sales, and promotions to smartphone users in your business's immediate vicinity. According to Plot projects statistics, geofencing improves app usage by more than 200%, resulting in higher consumer engagement and a higher chance of making a sale. Furthermore, geofencing has a fifteen-fold higher click-through rate than standard push alerts. This means that geofencing notifications have been shown to improve the number of people who click on the promotional message your company sends them. Geofencing can be a great benefit to small businesses wanting to boost consumer awareness of their brand because big organizations have the advantage of being well-known.
Stay Relevant
Relevance is everything when it comes to marketing your business! Advertising and marketing clutter is continuously bombarding consumers and has been doing so for years. According to USA Today, the average person is exposed to 3,000 to 5,000 advertisements per day. The consensus is that people don't want any more adverts and would be annoyed if they received them directly on their mobile devices. Recent research has debunked this misconception, finding that 70% of customers value geofencing notifications and that 53% are likely to engage with the advertisement.
With geofencing advertising, you can tailor the creative ads to the people who are strolling inside the geofences. If you want to reach people who are attending a conference, you can tailor your creative ads to those who are attending. However, if you wanted to alter the creative after a week, you could use geofencing to accomplish it. When compared to billboards, where you may not be able to modify your adverts for up to a year, this can be troublesome. This means your ads can always stay relevant.
Retailers can use geofencing to ask customers for immediate feedback on their previous store experience via push notification or an app message. This not only informs merchants on how they may improve but also provides valuable social proof for brand recognition. It also makes customers feel truly cherished and appreciated, resulting in more positive brand perception and overall experience. They are not only reminded of the store's offerings, but they also feel like they are a part of the brand's story.
Get More Bang for Your Buck
Because of the targeted nature of the campaign you are launching, geofencing is projected to yield a higher ROI than other brand and direct response efforts. You can obtain at least 97% greater reach for your money using geofencing than with simple targeted approaches like zip code targeting. Even if you only want to target a 1-mile radius around your site, compared to 10 buildings, geofencing will earn you at least 99% more reach.
Be More Efficient with Your Data
The machine that is modern business is driven by data. The faster and more precise data arrives, the faster clever businesses can react. Traditional paper discounts and media promotions are excellent but obtaining statistics on how efficient they are at attracting and keeping customers has always been tough. That isn't the case with geofencing!
The same approach can be used to assess if devices visit a retail store after getting any form of advertising when using location data to the target. You can tell how many individuals inside geofences saw your advertising and walked into your building after seeing them with geofencing. Setting up geofences in a certain location also allows a company to learn about things like foot traffic patterns, popular neighboring stores, how long people remain in one place, how often their messaging leads to a conversion, and which demographics convert the most. This information can then be used to inform the company's other marketing activities.
Geofencing Strategies Your Small Business Can Use
Conquest Other Businesses
Geo-conquesting is similar to geofencing, but instead of going around your firm, the "fence" goes around your competitors. This method allows you to target people who visit a competitor frequently or who live in the opponent's business region.
In December of 2018, an amazing example of this occurred. Geofences were constructed around Burger King's competitor, McDonald's. Customers would receive a notification from the Burger King Mobile app when they were within 600 feet of a McDonald's. The app advertised a $0.01 whopper and provided directions to the nearest Burger King. The "Whopper Detour" campaign received more than 1 million app downloads within a few days of its launch, and it eventually reached 1.5 million. Burger King's app was at the top of Apple's App Store for several days as a result of the promotion.
Utilize Customer Loyalty Programs
Loyalty programs are nothing new. Customers that buy or interact with a company regularly. As customers make more purchases, they may be rewarded with points or incentives, and the company may elevate them to higher degrees of loyalty.
Loyalty programs are thought to date back to the 18th century, when shop owners gave consumers copper tokens to use on future purchases, thereby creating a delayed discount scheme. In the nineteenth century, merchants began to use stamps, which evolved into third-party programs that offered a variety of goods. The "freebies" were eventually paid for in full and then some, but given that they had to buy items anyhow, it was an attempt to promote repeat visits and discourage customers from switching to another business.
Geofencing brings this concept into the future. Geofencing also aids companies in comprehending their clients' physical journeys and experiences. You can keep track of where your consumers shop at your competitors' stores. You will be able to make more customized offers as a result. You can also send adverts to your most loyal clients to increase engagement and loyalty.
Loyalty cards may become obsolete as a result of geofencing. Data can be used by retailers to target their most loyal customers. Another strategy is to team up with other non-competitive local businesses to attract customers to a specific location where everyone benefits. A bar might give a discount to people who go to the nearby athletic arena.
Get Social With Social Media
Geofencing is not just limited to a store’s app on the user’s phone. Social Media can also be leveraged using a geofence. Facebook, for example, is an excellent place to begin. It has over 2.2 billion users. It is the largest social media site today, with 1.4 billion individuals signing in and utilizing it for at least 1 or 2 hours every day.
It's easy to set up a geofence on Facebook. You can change certain variables to target a specific audience on the platforms. You can define the target age group for your audience as well as the gender of your adverts.
When you choose a location, the websites will display a map of your general area. You can choose a specific location and the site will create a 1-mile-wide geofence around it. You can even use the location exclusion option to reduce the 1-mile radius. This means you can concentrate your advertisements on a smaller area. You can also store a custom audience template to use with different advertising in the future.
Twitter too is an excellent option for geofencing as well. Geofencing on Twitter is more extensive. The procedure is comparable to Facebook's. It does, however, include the ability to branch your adverts across several areas. For international SEO coverage, you can even select to disperse your adverts throughout an entire target country. You can even specify an audience in an area that speaks a particular language, limiting the adverts to only those who speak and understand the language.
Twitter allows you to tailor various areas so that you may regulate the distribution of information by state, region, or even neighborhood. This capability comes in handy when you need to distribute adverts over a broad area.
Final Thoughts
To say the least, this is a competitive world, and it has become critical for modern organizations to be innovative and come up with new strategies to capture and retain customers' attention. Geofencing is one of the more unusual concepts that allows businesses to send a variety of materials to device users based on their geographic position in real-time but it is also one of the most effective ways to bring customers to your door.
Take a step back and consider who you want to reach out to and where they are located. Whether you're new to paid advertising or have more experience under your belt, the paid advertising experts at 7Social have the answers you need! We can assist you in developing a strategy and making recommendations that are appropriate for your small business.