This is Justin Croxton here again, one of the managing partners here at Propellant Media. I want to talk to you a little bit about some more geofencing, particularly, for auto dealerships, auto repair centers, everybody that happens to be in the automobile space essentially.
A lot of automobile repairs, repair locations, new car sales, a lot of things that we’re thinking about is how can we get more people, more foot traffic into our doors, that’s ultimately going to buy a car or get their car repaired, period. A lot of dealerships are spending a lot of money on Google AdWords, a lot of billboard, even a lot of TV, and some print. One of the things that we’ve been doing quite a bit for a number of dealerships out there is this new technology of what we call geofencing.
Target Your Competitor Car Dealership’s Foot Traffic
Geofencing gives us the ability to serve ads to people based on the places that they go. It’s incredibly precise, all the way to the point where we can build a geofence directly around a dealership or directly around a building. If you think about it, the practical uses of geofencing can be very, very, very, very interesting. We can target particular places that people go, we can target competitor locations, really, the sky is the limit.
I thought I’d just share with you an example of what we’ve been doing for a number of our clients and we’re just using a few hypotheticals here. Let’s say, for example, in this case Rick Hendrick of Chevrolet happens to be our client. I’m just using– this is hypothetical, I’m not saying they are our client, but let’s say they are. They want to target some of their direct competitors and they can consider Nelly of Nissan to be one of their direct competitors.
One of the things that we’ll typically do is we’ll go into a number of different competitors. Let’s say, Nelly Nissan, it just happens to be one of them. We’ll go directly to their location. We’ll click here and then we will build literally a geofence directly around their facility, right here. Then maybe we also want to build a geofence around their collision center because someone that got into an accident may be looking for a new car. Maybe they’re getting their car repaired, but maybe they’re thinking to themselves,”You know I’ll probably need to go and get a new car anyway.”
How Geofencing Advertising Works For Car Dealers
Anybody that walks inside of these two geofences that has a mobile device on them, we now have the access to their ID on their mobile device. Whenever they open up different apps on their mobile device or if they open up a website that has some form of advertising space, then our ads are going to be served on those particular devices on those different apps or on those websites. They’ll be able to see those ads both while they’re there at one of the centers as well as after they leave for up to 30 days.
Why Geofencing is 97% More Efficient Than Traditional Advertising
That could be really, really powerful. You think about all the money that you’re currently spending on online and offline marketing. It’s a lot of a spray effect. You try to get your message out to the masses in hope that a number of those individuals are going to come back to your facility, which is still important. I’m never going to discount TV, print, billboard, all those other forms of advertising. Very, very critical, nonetheless.
If you really are thinking about, how can I really hone in my marketing dollars to a core area of folks that you know are in market buyers, people that are in the market likely looking to purchase a vehicle. This can be an incredibly powerful and very effective strategy.
Track Online Advertising To Offline Foot Traffic
Before I leave, this was just one other thing I want to mention. How are you tracking and measuring the foot traffic that’s coming from TV, billboard, and print? You’re not, right? Maybe you are to an extent, but you’re kind of just hoping that the billboard, the TV, and the advertising that you’re doing offline is actually translating into foot traffic to your business. How do you really know what that return on an investment is?
The other really powerful thing with geofencing is what we have what’s called conversion zone tracking. We can actually track the number of individuals or the number of times someone saw one of your ads, clicked on one of your ads, and then came back to your automobile dealership. In this case, what you can see here is that for Nelly Nissan and their auto repair location and our client is Rick Hendrick. Rick Hendrick wants to know how many of those individuals actually came back to their location.
One of the things that we’ll typically do is, we’ll go to their location. We will literally build a conversion zone around their facility. Anybody that was in one of these centers and saw our ads or clicked on one of the ads, and then came back to Rick Hendrick of Chevrolet here in Duluth, we can now report that data and report that information back to our client. Which at that point, now they have something else much more measurable. Now we have the ability to truly track and measure the success of all the campaigns that we’re doing from a geofencing standpoint.
Implementing Geofencing Into Your Marketing Budget
This is really powerful stuff folks. At our agency, we’ve been doing. Again, we do quite a number of things from geofencing and programmatic display and all types of stuff that we really get quite a bit of joy out of. This area of both geofencing and conversion zone tracking is really powerful.
If you have any questions, if there’s something that’s of interest to you in your automobile dealership please feel free to reach out. We’re here to answer any questions that you may have. I really do hope this was useful to you. Hope to talk to you soon. Again, thanks so much from Propellant Media. Talk to you soon. Take care.