This is the era of technology, and technology has made marketing very easy as well as very effective. The agencies are discovering new marketing techniques and implementing them like Geofencing Marketing to get most of the campaigns.
This technology-driven marketing technique allows advertisers to show personalized messages, or ads to the audience only when they are near their store or market, making the marketing campaign effective.
This blog post explains what geofencing marketing is, how it works, what its benefits are, and how you can get the most out of it. Let's dive deeper into Geofencing Marketing.
What is Geofencing Marketing
Marketing Agencies create a virtual boundary around a specific location (a store, or a market) using GPS, WiFi, or Radio technologies. When somebody with their smartphone enters this virtual boundary, the advertisements or messages from that store are shown to the users. Geofencing Marketing is an effective way to reach potential customers right when they are near a store, making the marketing or advertisement effective.
Imagine, you are going through a market, and there is a notification bell on your smartphone, you check the notification, and it is about NIKE's 50% off sale this week, You look up and see that you are in front of the Nike store. How's that?
Let's take another example: You are again in a market or a mall, and you see a notification from Starbucks saying: "Hi, There is 20% off on your favorite drink at Starbucks today.", you plan to drink that, but you think oh! I have to search for Starbucks nearby, but Starbucks is exactly where you stand.
This is called Geofencing Marketing. The Nike store has used geofencing marketing to show their ads or messages to the audience near or in the store. This is an effective way to show the advertisement and messages to the right audience timely.
What is the difference between digital marketing and geofencing marketing? The main thing is that in Geofencing marketing, a Geo Information System is involved in detecting the customer's location and showing the ads based on their location.
Types of Geofencing Marketing Campaigns
We have come to know that geofencing marketing uses location-based technology to identify potential customers, targeting a specific location or event in a particular area. There are some popular types of Geofencing marketing campaigns used these days.
1- Local Geofencing
Local geofencing is a marketing strategy that defines a specific geographic area (predefined location), such as the vicinity around a store or shopping mall. This area is typically set with a certain radius, creating a virtual boundary. When people enter or move within this predefined zone, the geofencing technology detects their presence. This allows businesses to track foot traffic and gather data on the number of potential customers in the area.
.png)
Once the presence of individuals is detected, personalized advertisements can be delivered directly to their mobile devices. These ads are tailored to the interests and behaviors of the people within the geofenced area, making the marketing efforts more targeted and effective.
This approach helps businesses engage with potential customers in real-time, enhancing the chances of attracting them into the store or mall and ultimately increasing sales.
2- Event based Geofencing
Event based geofencing focuses on people who are going to attend or attending or have attended a particular event like a concert, exhibition, or trade show in a specific location, and show personalized ads to these people to get leads.
If you are a brand that sells musical instruments, you can use Event based Geofencing, it will be useful in a way that you only want to focus on people who are interested in music, and these people might be interested in buying musical instruments. You can then show ads of your products using Event based Geofencing.
3- Competitor Geofencing
Competitor geofencing targets customers who visit your competitor’s location by displaying special offers and promotions to attract them to your brand. This strategy is particularly effective when your competitor has a large customer base. By offering incentives such as discounts and new products, you can entice these customers to visit your store instead.
There are many more types of Geofencing marketing, but we have discussed some of the popular and most commonly used campaign types.
Benefits of Geofencing Marketing
1- Precise Audience Targeting
In other techniques of digital marketing, we target a random audience, or we don't actually know that the audience will engage or make a purchase, but when it comes to Geofencing marketing, there are huge changes of audience to be converted to potential customers, as geofencing marketing focuses on timely advertisement to the audience present in a particular location.
The audience is near a market or store and may be they are looking for the products or things that you are offering but they don't know about that, Geofencing marketing encourges them or facilitates them by showing the relevant ads.
2- Realtime Engagement
Realtime Engagement is one of the key focuses of Geofencing marketing. Realtime engagement means, the customer is present near your store or in the store, and he is looking at the ad messages of sales and discounts or may be messages of new products.
.png)
The customers are engaged in realtime, while walking near your store or while shopping in your store. This realtime engagement provides benefits to both the customer as well as the advertiser.
3- Improved Customer Experience
Geofencing marketing helps in improving the Customer Experience, as the customers get the personalized ads of discounts, sales, introduction to new products, or anything related to it, this thing helps them to decide, and buy the product.
Geofencing marketing actually facilitates the customers by reminding them about a particular thing they might be interested in. If the customer was already looking for this, then his experience is improved by Geofencing Marketing.
4- Competitor Advantage
Geofencing marketing lets you attract the competitor's customers towards your store by targeting the competitor's location in a market. If you want to attract the customers of your competitor, then you can use Geofencing marketing.
Geofencing marketing will collect the data of all the people who are near your competitor's location and may be they are going to buy something from them but not from you, you can use geofencing marketing and tell the people or customers of competitor about your deals, and sales.
5- Cost Effective
While doing any other type of marketing like bill boards, google ads, or facebook ads, or any other digital ads, you are not sure about the success of your campaign. You spend a lot of money to show your ads and in return you don't know that the audience will come to you or not.
But in case of Geofencing marketing, you just spend money to show your ads to the specific audience only, and there are huge changes of lead generation from this. In this way, Geofencing marketing is also cost effective.
Industries Using Geofencing Marketing
There are many industries using geofencing marketing to attract the customers towards their business. Retail industry is one of them, as we have discussed in this article. Retail industries use this to show their ads with promotions, sales, and deals.
Similarly, Restaurants use geofencing to show their menus, rents, and other relevant details to attract the new customers. This helps them to show their ads to only relevant audience.
Real Estate industry is totally focused to Geofencing marketing. Imagine your are showing your ad to the people who are far from your location and there are not much changes of lead generaion, then what you can do is Geofencing marketing. Geofencing will show your ads to the people specifically when they are at your location, and when they see your ad, they may would like to visit you.
Similarly there are many more industries like Event management, Marriage halls, Travel and Hospitality industries using geofencing marketing to minimize their spends and maximize lead generation.