Have you ever thought about targeting a specific group of people who visited a defined location? That location could be your restaurant, hotel, casino, store or any other physical point of sale or general location like a specific market, mall or an apartment building. It could even be your competitor’s physical point of sale. Such location based targeting is made possible by using an advanced location targeting method, known as geofencing. Today, we’ll take a look at what geofencing is, how it works and how businesses have utilized it successfully to increase customer footfall.

What is Geofencing?

Geofencing is an advanced type of location based digital consumer targeting technique that is revolutionizing the way digital marketers and advertisers market, advertise and remarket their products or services to their target market. Since geofencing is a location targeting technique it requires data pertaining to a person’s location. This data is obtained from consumers’ mobile phone devices who enter a designated area. A person who enters a specific virtual barrier even for once can be geo targeted for up to 30 days. Since geofencing is a location based technology it relies heavily upon various technologies like mobile network, GPS, RFID, bluetooth and wifi. This data then collectively helps in identifying a person’s location using geo mapping.

How Does Location Targeting Work?

The concept of geofencing is very simple to grasp. Since geofencing works on location targeting, the advertiser or marketeer needs to define a parameter for location targeting. When someone enters that geofenced area with location turned on, on their smartphone or uses an app that records location activity that device is added to the location targeting list. Advertisers then start serving relevant ads to that person using various digital advertising platforms. A person can be targeted on the basis of location for upto 30 days. When it comes to location targeting it doesn’t matter how much time was spent by the person in that geofenced parameter. All a person needs to do is step into the area marked for location targeting and they will automatically be entered into the location targeting list of relevant advertisers. If a person’s location targeting data is captured even once, they can be served ads across a variety of different platforms ranging from website, to in app notifications and social media ads. For a more in depth understanding, let’s take a look at an example of how location fencing works. Let’s say you open a new casino in Las Vegas. You want to increase your customer footfall. For that, what you can do is you can either geofence the street where you are situated, or even geofence your competitors to target their customers. You can also remarket to your newly acquired customers by geofencing your own casino as well. Anyone who steps into your location targeting zone will be served ads for upto 30 days. Just note that you can place your location geo-fence on almost any physical location that you want and think will bring you effective results.

Measuring Effectiveness of Location Targeting

Measuring results and effectiveness of any location targeting based marketing or advertising campaign is of paramount importance. Measuring results helps us optimize our targeted marketing campaign to achieve better results. Ad campaigns can be optimized by identifying the gaps in the current marketing effort and filling those loopholes for better results using various strategies, tools and creativity. Measurement of location targeting results depends on the nature of brand objectives that were set for the geofencing campaign. For brand awareness and reach campaigns, impressions, clicks and cost per click and cost per lead can be used as a good measure of effectiveness but they become obsolete for conversion campaigns. So for conversion campaigns, conversion, cost per sale and ROI are better indicators of success.

Impact of Geofencing on Business

Let’s take a deeper look at how location targeting helps a business grow it’s profitability both in the short as well as in the long run.

1. Increased Brand Awareness

Location targeting using geofencing can help increase brand awareness in a more targeted and personalized way. Increased brand awareness can in turn help a business achieve a variety of marketing, sales and overall business objectives. It helps in audience expansion, increases web traffic, builds brand affinity and cultivates more leads. Brand awareness has a significant impact on the purchase decision of the consumers hence having a strong brand presence always pays off.

2. Enhanced Brand Loyalty

Location targeting can provide a personalized experience to your target audience hence making your brand stand out from your competitors. This competitive edge over your competition will in turn help you enhance your customers’ brand loyalty towards your brand increasing their trust in your business.

3. Better Defined Targeted Audience

Location targeting can help you define your broad audience into a more targeted one. Since you target consumers in a particular vicinity, you can show them various ads that achieve your marketing objectives. The objectives might include increasing customer footfall on various physical points of sales, targeting competitors’ customers, building pre-launch hype before opening a physical retail outlet or restaurant or any other business. Whatever the objective may be you can achieve it by better targeting your audience and showing ads to a more targeted and customized audience. This will not only help in increasing ads performance but will also reduce overall ad cost per impression since now you will be targeting a very specific and targeted audience.

Geofencing Industry Case Studies

To get a better understanding of how geofencing and location targeting will work for you, we have provided a few case studies about how location targeting reshaped marketing for these industry leaders.

1. Use Of Geofencing By Dominos

Dominos recently launched a location targeting campaign in Florida. They aimed to reach people staying in hotels throughout the state. For this, Dominos created a location targeting marketing campaign. They placed geofields around various hotels to tap consumers by triggering mobile advertising on popular apps and mobile sites. When clicked these ads were redirected to various online ordering options. The campaign was a huge success as it significantly increased new customer acquisition and increased sales and ultimately revenue for Dominos. It also helped dominos identify an underlying new target market of people from outside the state staying in hotels. They included both tourists and people who came for work.

2. How Volkswagen Uses Geotargeting?

Geofencing doesn’t only have to target locations where your customers might be. Location targeting can also be used to target places where your competitors’ customers might be visiting frequently. If you want to target your competitors’ customers then what is a better place than to target people visiting your competitors outlet. Volkswagen also did something on the same lines. Instead of creating a geofence around the parameters of their own showroom they started geotargeting their competitors dealerships. Volkswagen had first hand data that ideally potential customers check their mobile phones while waiting for a sales person, getting car maintenance or while getting an oil change. So serving their competitors’ customers through location targeting seemed the perfect method to send their message across. This brought in insanely positive results for Volkswagen. It increased customer footfall across major dealerships of Volkswagen. This campaign received over 300,000 impressions in just 8 weeks. The major reason behind the success of this campaign was that through location targeting Volkswagen was able to tap the right audience at the right moment. People analyzed other options while purchasing a car and Volkswagen would become that option for them.

Conclusion

In an ever changing world of digital marketing, location targeting is one of the best options available for targeting exact customers on the basis of their demographics and even in some cases on the basis of their interests. Using location targeting, you can segment your audience on the basis of their genders (targeting only for female or male locations), household income, socioeconomic class and the list goes on. It is helping brands reshape their marketing efforts and change marketing as we know it. If used properly, location targeting can be very profitable for the businesses.

Conduct Geofencing With Accurate Digital Solutions

Accurate Digital Solutions has helped dozens of companies get the most out of their digital marketing strategies. We are experts in executing the whole array of digital marketing services from start to finish. So contact us if you want to launch an effective geofencing marketing campaign for your business.