The Power of Geofencing – Location-Based Marketing Guide
One of the major reasons you are still struggling in converting your leads to paying customers is because your ads are not seen by people who are more likely to buy your products or subscribe to your services.
So, how can you get leads that are more likely to convert into paying customers?
Geofencing marketing guarantees at least 97% reach to leads that are more likely to convert!
It is a location-based digital marketing tool that enables marketers or business owners to send text ads to highly-targeted prospects when they are in a specific vicinity.
For example, if you are a PR company that targets small to medium enterprises, you can geofenced people who are attending a business conference inside a hotel. These people are more likely to become paying customers because every serious company needs to publish and distribute a press release once in a while says Qamar Zaman CEO of KISS PR Press Release Service.
And, even if those people have already left the hotel, you can still send follow up text ads if they show engagement to your first text. You can do these in the next 30 days after they received your ad.
Geofencing allows you to market your product or services more precisely to prospects that are about to buy from your competitors. Consider the scenario of a prospect who enters a baby store, one of your competitors. Using Geofencing, you can target that prospect, send a text ad containing a promo or discount to your newly-arrived baby apparel.
What would you think will happen once that prospect reads your text, more especially if your competitor is not giving any discounts or promo? Of course, she’ll head to your store and buy the discounted items.
Geofencing is ideal for small businesses because it enables business owners to go hyperlocal. This means that they don’t only target their prospects based on which city they are, they target prospects based on which building or street area they are.
With geofencing, small businesses can save more resources because they won’t waste spending their budget on ads that randomly target people. It is a cost-effective strategy wherein every penny they allocated is spent on prospects that are more likely to become paying customers.
Most small businesses have a tight marketing budget, thus it is very important that only very minimal resources are wasted. With geofencing, the chance of converting prospect customers is high because your product or service is marketed in front of people who are more likely to use it based on where they are or what they are doing.
Also, as geofencing ads are served through smartphones, the fact that 81% of Americans currently own one is another major factor small businesses need to consider. Not taking advantage of this means missing out on a lot of potential real-time audience engagement.
Geofencing is location-based mobile advertising that utilizes software technology such as GPS, RFID, or Wi-Fi. The software or app enables a pre-programmed action whenever a mobile device is tracked entering or leaving a virtual boundary. This virtual boundary is set around a very specific area or location which is known as a geofence.
When a geofence is set, the software starts capturing the mobile device IDs of people who enter or leave a specified virtual boundary – this is your opportunity to send real-time ads to prospect customers.
What makes geofencing incredible is the fact that it allows you to send follow up messages to your prospects within 30 days after they entered or exited the virtual boundary you set. This gives you more opportunities to convince undecided ones and increases the chance of them turning into paying customers.
Because geofencing is a location-based service, it naturally brings many benefits to small and local businesses.
With geofencing, you can attract new customers every time prospects end up inside your geofenced radius. Imagine setting a geofence at a particular social media marketing event, currently happening inside the function room of a prominent hotel, and sending ads to attendees about a new social media management tool that is currently on sale at 50% discount if a user subscribe during that day. What do you think the response rate would be?
Because your offer is timely and that the people you sent your ads to are currently in the right place, time and mindset, it is expected that they are more likely to engage and convert into paying customers.
When you geofenced a virtual location, you are doing the blasting of text ads in real-time, eliminating the chance for your prospects to think of other alternatives or brands. This gives you a great opportunity to capture all their attention and use impulsiveness to push them to buy your product or subscribe to your service.
You can also divert the attention of your prospects entering the restaurant of your competitor through geofencing. The moment they enter the radius you set, you can send them an offer that is too difficult to pass up. Instead of dining in at your competitor’s place, there’s a higher probability that they will end up dining at yours.
This is one of the obvious benefits of geofencing. Knowing the exact location of your prospects and what they are doing, helps you create better messaging strategy that boosts conversion.
In most cases, a prospect’s impulsiveness is directly influenced by what they are doing and by their surroundings. Knowing these important factors is very crucial as this greatly determines the success of your ads.
Because you can create a better-messaging strategy with geofencing, it is a given that engagement is higher compared to other kinds of advertising.
When you craft your message specifically for the people who enter your virtual fence, you can incorporate hints that can answer their immediate needs.
For example, you are an insurance company, and you geofenced people who enter a hospital’s emergency room, what do you think is their most pressing needs? Of course, money. And this is where you can position your product. Offering these people an easy way to avail health insurance that can help them pay for their hospital bills is an excellent strategy to capture their attention.
When you run a geofencing campaign, it is easier to analyze the response of your target audience because it has a very straightforward approach.
You can easily determine what needs to be done to improve your strategy, thus giving you a higher chance of getting better and faster ROI.
With geofencing, data from the virtual and physical world are combined, which can provide you a more detailed and insightful marketing analytics. This data can give you in-depth insight about the interest and intent of your target audience.
Your geofencing data can even help you determine what time of the day your prospects are more inclined to spend money the most. Knowing this kind of information can definitely boost not only engagement but more importantly, your conversion.
Generally, geofencing marketing is good for local businesses because it enables marketers or business owners to go hyperlocal. Here are the specific industries which geofencing marketing is most suitable for:
When running a geofencing marketing campaign, the type of text message you send to your prospects is very crucial. Here are some sample options you can use.
Use your creativity and data on hand to craft on-point messages that can get the most response.
You should stop wasting your time in waters where there are no fish. With geofencing marketing, you only fish where the fish are, and these are not just some random fish, these are fish that are more likely to take your bait.
Why waste your time randomly targeting people when you can do it more accurately using geofencing technology? You save both your time and resources when you only offer your products or services to people who urgently need them.
Going hyperlocal is what geofencing marketing is all about. It is about diverting the attention of your prospects entering the store of your competitors and convincing them that they should check out yours instead.
In setting up your virtual fence, the smaller the radius, the better. Just make sure that there is always foot traffic coming in and out of your virtual fences.
When you target people based on where they are and what they are doing, the messages you send should particularly answer their immediate needs. This is taking advantage of people’s impulsiveness.
A prospect customer attending a job fair is more likely to join a career enhancement seminar after you geofenced a job fair venue and send all those who entered your virtual parameter a discounted offer with a time limit. These job seekers are willing to invest in themselves so that they can successfully land their dream job.
Whether you want to increase brand awareness or improve your sales, you should not run a geofence campaign without a specific goal.
The more specific the goal, the better. This helps you easily measure ad performance, and add or remove details that work or not working.
Location-based services, such as geofencing marketing, is effective because it utilizes one very important factor – timing! Imagine serving ads to random prospects while they are watching their favorite YouTube video, they will just ignore your ad, and worst would feel annoyed because they found it a disturbance or nuisance.
With geofencing marketing, you are utilizing the best time to approach your prospect, thus increasing the chance of getting higher engagement and faster conversion.
In whatever marketing campaign you do, tracking and measuring performance is very crucial. With geofencing marketing, you can take note of metrics that directly affect your ROI to continually implement messaging strategies that can improve the results of your campaign.
Geofencing marketing is dependent on mobile, and if you are still not aware, mobile is the present and future of business and technology trends.
If you don’t take advantage of this kind of location-based marketing, your competitors will, and it will be too late for you to realize when your competitors have already stolen your potential customers just because you failed to see its great potential.
But, great news! According to Search Engine Watch’s survey, only 22% of businesses are using geofencing to its full potential. With this statistic, you can still take full advantage of geofencing marketing in your industry as there are still many who are not aware of it.
The best time to take advantage of a technology is when almost no one from your competitors expects what they are up against.
Cast your doubts aside and take advantage of this innovative marketing tactic as early as possible. If you are interested but don’t know where to get started, our website design and marketing experts here at KISS PR can help you set up and run a geofencing marketing campaign designed to fit the needs of your business.
Our team will create a detailed geofencing marketing plan for you wherein you can track everything being implemented from start to finish. Give us a call today at 239-373-5255 for a FREE geofencing marketing consultation.
Agnes Zang
Give us a call today at 239-373-5255 for a FREE geofencing marketing consultation.
