There are approximately more than three billion smartphone users globally, making smartphones an excellent marketing tool. The upward trend in the adoption of smartphones is changing the way companies advertise. Geofencing advertising is a marketing tactic wherein a virtual boundary is set up around a location, and people that enter the set boundary are shown specific ads.
An advanced geofencing platform would even allow you to set a fence as narrow as a single building. For instance, there is a business conference in a hotel and anyone who walks into the hotel will be explicitly shown curated ads.
While you have the option to set up a location on social media platforms when running advertisements, the average click-through rate of such platforms has spiralled down to 0.5%. In contrast, geofencing targets a precise location and shows the ads only when the target audience walks in the fence.
What is Geofencing?
Geofencing is a direct-to-mobile form of advertising that allows marketers to serve ads to people that fit their set demographics and precise location. After setting up a geofence for a certain location, marketers can then serve ads to people who come inside their geofence and even after they leave for up to thirty-five days. These ads are served in the form of banner ads, push notifications, video ads, in-app advertisements and much more.
Using geofencing could be a challenging task in the beginning. So, here are some of the ways you can effectively use a geofencing platform.
1. Define precise parameters
The target audience of your marketing campaigns is often very well-defined on paper. But, it is tricky to be sure of the people to whom you would serve the advertisements. However, with geofencing, you can structure your marketing campaigns to reach a target audience. For instance, if you own a cafe and want to advertise, you would virtually fence an area within a ten-mile radius to broadcast your advertisement.
2. Go local
You can reach a large audience with geofencing, but such campaigns are the most effective when done locally within a very short radius. For example, if you have a gym in the strip mall of a residential area, then reaching out to the target audience within a shorter distance would fetch you better results. A large radius for a geofencing campaign is useless if you are a local business, it would only diminish your ROI (return on investment).
3. Do A/B testing
Marketers can not emphasise enough the importance of A/B testing when running any kind of campaign. As a company or a business, you must try out different content in your campaign to see which one delivers the best ROI. Experiment with the designs of the ads, colours, offers and other characteristics of the advertisement. In addition, experiment with different locations to determine which one yields the best results.
4. Understand your customer base
Since geofencing is a location-based technology, it can help you understand your customers better by providing additional metrics. A geofencing platform allows you to track metrics like the frequency of a customer’s visits and the time of their visits. It can enhance your understanding of consumer’s behaviour so that you can plan more effective campaigns.
5. Offer relevant content
Content is a marketer’s favourite tool to invoke emotions or entice the target audience to perform the desired actions. Just like any other campaign, the content you wish to serve to the audience must be highly relevant and meaningful for your target audience. This means that if you own a restaurant, offering special deals and discounts on holidays will generate a more positive response. Curating ads pertaining to the needs of the customer is the key to achieve desired results.
So, the next time you run a geofencing campaign, make sure that you experiment with your ads, define precise parameters, and offer high-quality content. There is no rule when it comes to running a successful campaign, so always learn from the metrics and adapt to the changes.
