This is Justin Croxton at Propellant Media, one of the managing partners here at the agency. I thought it would be appropriate to give everyone a little bit of a demo on exactly what geofencing advertising is and how it can make a huge difference for your business in attracting customers or increasing brand awareness. What exactly is geofencing advertising? How does it work, and what is geofencing marketing?

What is Geofencing Advertising & How does it Work?

We define geofencing advertising as direct-to-mobile advertising that allows companies to serve ads to people based on their physical activities and the places they go. You can use geofencing with static ads, programmatic videos, and connected TV OTT advertising. It’s not simply zip code or citywide targeting, but instead, our ability to serve ads to people that walk inside of individual buildings, let’s say, an event that’s happening at, let’s say, a convention center, or a conference, or something more along those lines, or one of your competitor locations.

Types of Geofencing Advertising

Geofencing ads are of two types: active and passive. For the active geofencing ads to run, the mobile app needs to be open, as these marketing campaigns depend on the user’s GPS location. Meanwhile, for passive geofencing ads, marketing campaigns can be triggered without the need for the user to have the mobile app open. Aside from these, there are other primary ways an organization can use to reach its target audience. These are:

Radius Targeting

Instead of selecting specific locations and regions, radius targeting techniques involve keeping a geographic location as the center point for the marketing campaign and creating a radius from that point. To get the maximum benefits from your geofencing marketing strategy, the radius should be set between 300 and 490 feet (100 to 150 meters).

Polygon Targeting

Polygon targeting involves selecting a specific size or shape for the target area where the ad will be shown to the target audience. Rectangles, squares, and triangles are commonly used shapes; yet some polygon targeting shapes can be irregular in nature. No pins or radius is used, giving marketers the opportunity to run advertising campaigns in areas of their choice.

5 Benefits of Geofencing for Marketing

Geofencing enables a business to target specific locations and run marketing campaigns that can draw higher traction, eventually turning into store visits and sales. The advertising strategy works amazingly for businesses located in a competitive neighborhood. Here are all the benefits of geofencing marketing that are worth considering:

1. Reach Customers at the Right Time and Place

Geofencing marketing campaigns makes it easier for businesses to reach their target audience at the right time and place by sending out marketing messages on their mobile devices directly in the form of push notifications. GPS coordinates are often used for location-based targeting, allowing businesses to target nearby interested customers, saving costs while maximizing conversion potential. As your business will be sharing direct offers and discounts on an individual’s mobile device, there’s a higher possibility of your customers taking an interest in your products and services.

2. Boost Local Sales and Brand Awareness

A local business often struggles to create a mark for themselves and geofencing marketing can be incredibly beneficial in helping local businesses to gain more prominence in the locality. As geofencing enables location targeting, businesses only run their advertising campaigns in areas or for customer demographics that are relevant for them. Since the ad campaigns will run in highly specific locations, they will encourage brand awareness and drive results for your marketing strategies.

3. Increase Engagement and Conversions

When your business sends marketing messages to the target audience directly, they are more likely to feel excited and enticed by the offer. It eventually results in them wanting to explore what else your store has to offer and will start considering visiting your store’s location. As these ads get triggered when the mobile device enters the virtual boundary that has been set close to your store’s location, then potential customers are more likely to stop by and make a purchase. Even if they end up not making a purchase, visiting the physical location ends up build an emotional connection with your brand, which your potential customers will be eager to turn into a shopping experience soon.

4. Targeted Marketing with Better ROI

Since geofencing ads target a highly specific location, businesses have more control over whom they are showing their ads to. As a result, it is highly unlikely that the ads will be shown to people who are not interested and instead to people who are willing to make a purchase. Due to this, the overall turnout of the campaigns will be higher ROI and more local customers. A geofencing campaign allows any business location to run ads and attract potential customers to their physical stores.

5. Gain Valuable Customer Insights

The ads used for geofencing marketing campaigns are highly customizable depending on the specific location that is being targeted, adding more depth to your marketing efforts. This nature allows geofencing marketing to work wonders for businesses that want to analyze data before making any changes in their marketing strategy. Another key benefit is that you can easily research the ads running at your competitor’s location and how they differ from your campaigns.

It gives incredible insights into what your competitors are doing differently and how you can upgrade your strategy to increase sales, be seen in local searches, and gain preference in your target location. Besides, location data helps determine the effectiveness of your location-based marketing strategy.

How to Implement Geofencing into Your Marketing Strategy

Before kickstarting your geofencing campaign, it is crucial that you take your customer’s journey into consideration. A seamless customer journey will make it easier for your customers to decide on a purchase decision. To ensure your ads hit the sweet spot every time, here are the strategies you should consider following:

• Define clear and attainable goals. Without these, you won’t be able to determine the metrics to track.
• Select the areas/locations you want to geofence. If you are uncertain, revisit where your target demographic that are more likely to visit and guaranteed to trigger your campaign.
• Determine the actions that will trigger the marketing campaign. The most commonly used trigger is your ideal customer crossing the geofenced area or opening the mobile app when in the geofenced zone.
• Create persuasive ad copies that are hyperpersonalized and enticing. Present an offer that is hard to resist. Creating a fear of missing out spirit can turn quick results.
• Track and monitor performance by using tools like Google Display Network and Google Ads.

Real-World Examples of Geofencing Marketing

Geofencing marketing has been helping businesses target and attract their ideal customers for years. It is effective and ensures your customers come across the ads at the right time. Here’s how some popular brands used geofencing marketing to work wonders for their ad campaigns:

Starbucks

Starbucks uses its geofencing campaigns to attract customers who are in close proximity to the store or are in the surrounding area. Starbucks used geofencing to advertise drinks and offers that can be availed. It sends out push notifications on user’s mobile devices that are loaded with special offers and discounts if they visit the store now. Their geofencing marketing campaign is usually active for happy hour every Thursday between 2 to 7 PM and has always drawn higher footfalls and ROI. They also customize their location-targeting ads to entice their customers further.

Dunkin’

Dunkin’ has a geofencing marketing strategy similar to Starbucks’, enticing customers to visit the physical store to make a purchase. They launched their own donut filter on Snapchat during National Donut Day. Anyone who took a Snapchat near the store or in the geofenced area would get access to the filter. The campaign was a hit, and many customers used the filter on Snapchat and did get a free donut with their orders.

Uber

Uber excels at location-based marketing as it sends in-app push notifications to entice its users to book an Uber to visit a popular nearby area. The cab service provider sets up geofences around places like airports, nightclubs, hotels, spas etc and sends them notifications about available Uber drivers ready to take them to their destination. Often people end up booking a Uber, generating revenue for the cab service provider.

Johns Hopkins Hospital

Johns Hopkins Hospital used geofencing marketing to attract potential employees to work with them. The hospital used social media ads to come on the feed of qualified people, urging them to apply for the available positions. The target audience was people with expertise in pediatrics. Facebook and LinkedIn were the social media platforms extensively used for this purpose.

C.R. England

Similarly how Johns Hopkins Hospital used geofencing marketing to attract eligible candidates to fill a job opening, C. R. England used geofencing to attract truck driver to fill open job positions. Their ads showed the perks they were offering (aside from industry standards) to entice people. The combination of persuasive ad copy and geofencing marketing helped them find eligible candidates.

Best Practices for Using Geofencing Marketing

Here are key ways to make geofencing marketing work for your business:

Create ad copies that resonate with your target audience

Your ad copies are the first piece of content that your target audience will come across when they enter the geofenced area. A long and wordy ad will be seen as a distraction and will be dismissed by your demography. Instead, keep your ad copies short and crisp, making it easier for your potential customers to see the value being offered and interact with the ad campaign.

As the marketing messages will be seen on mobile devices, make sure to limit the number of characters you are using and avoid writing overly long sentences. If your business plans to send notifications on the app, keeping it quirky with a clear call-to-action can drive instant clicks.

Create geofences at locations you want to target

There’s no doubt geofences are incredibly powerful, but with a poorly constructed fence, you will only end up with virtual boundaries that are not as effective as they potentially can be. If your store has physical locations, you may want to create dedicated geofences targeting nearby locations. To make your geofencing campaign effectively target your potential customers, consider factoring in the areas where your target people spend most of their time. If your retail store happens to be on a busy street, avoid sending more than two notifications, as it can frustrate your customers.

Keep your virtual boundaries small

Geofences work best when strategically placed at locations where your potential customers are likely to trigger them. An overly big geofence can dilute your marketing efforts, bring in a wider data pool, and result in a larger ad budget. Instead, consolidate your fence to a smaller area where your target customers spend most of their time and are more likely to visit the retail store or make a purchase.

Choose triggers that start the advertising campaign

Triggers are important to make your geofencing campaign work. These triggers do not have to be overly sophisticated; instead, they are actions that your potential customers are guaranteed to take. Place these triggers along the line of where your target customers enter or exit a geofenced area.

Use direct and action-oriented CTAs

Since geofencing ads carry an offer or a discount, a clear call-to-action button must be included in your ads to help users determine what they need to do to avail of the offer. Do they need to drive to your retail store, or do they need to register on an app before shopping? A clear CTA will tell them what they need to do.

Monitor performance using a dependable marketing tool

Once you have the geofencing campaign set and running, consider continuously evaluating the performance to identify if there’s any room for change. It also helps in gaining audience insights that can help create geofenced ads for behavioral targeting.

Measuring and Analyzing Geofencing Campaigns

Once your geofencing marketing campaign is live and driving results, it becomes crucial to monitor the performance and optimize geofenced ads to improve user experience. Without adequate monitoring, you may miss out on opportunities. Here are some key performance indicators to track:

• Foot traffic
• Conversions
• Engagement rates
• Dwell time of customers
• Time spent in the geofenced area
• Patterns, preferences, and trends

Aside from these, track these parameters as well:

• Cost per thousand
• Cost per click
• Clickthrough rate
• App engagement
• In-store traffic
• Referral rates
• Customer effort score
• Retention or churn rates
• Customer lifetime value

It is worth noting that geofenced ads shouldn’t be one-size-fits-all but instead include factors that matter to your business. Determining what success looks like for your business is important to making it happen.

Where Are Ads Served With Geofencing Advertising

What we’re doing is we’re building what’s called a digital geofence around one or more locations. Anybody who walks inside those locations can be served ads. We now have the ability to serve ads to those individuals, both while they’re there at that location and after they leave that location for up to 30 days. Where will they see those ads? There are two different ways. The first is in the app. We have access to well over 700,000 apps; you think about Angry Birds, Words with Friends, weather.com, and the Weather Channel. All those apps are places where customers or individuals who walk inside of that geofence would see those ads.

Then, it’s also in the browser. There are websites that have geofencing advertising supplies, and we have the ability to serve ads on those channels as well. But those are essentially the ways in which geofencing works, and that’s how it can make a huge difference for any company. Instead of just giving you the definition, I figured I would give you an actual live demonstration of how it works. This is the back end of our platform and what we utilize for geofencing.

Geofencing Advertising For Attorneys & Lawyers

Again, we’re not targeting an entire block, for example. At the end of the day, we’re trying to achieve as much advertising efficiency with our dollars as we possibly can. In this case, we’ll give you a couple of examples. Let’s say you’re a personal injury lawyer, and you know that accident victims are your clientele. Where do accident victims go? Typically, they’re going to go to a hospital, an ER center, a car dealership, a car repair location, or a towing location.

Geofencing For Medical Practices

Those are probably the places that make the most sense to really hone in on your marketing dollars. In this case, we have a location here, Emory Saint Joseph’s Hospital. We did a search for Emergency Care of Atlanta, and this is what showed up. As we go onto the platform, what we’re essentially doing here is building a digital geofence, only around the contours of the building.

We’re not including 285, or I85, or Georgia 400, or any of these other roads, just people that walk inside of this geofence, and all of those individuals will now have the ability- maybe not all but at least 90% of them will now have the ability to see ads directly from you, as a personal injury lawyer, both while they’re there at the location, as well as after they leave from that location.

As you can imagine, that’s very powerful, because now you’re really honing in on your advertising dollars and ensuring that you’re showing clients- or not so much clients but you’re certainly getting your message in front of the people that are most likely to turn into a customer or into a client for your brand or for your business. That was one example. Let’s take it a step further.

Geofencing For Trade Shows & Conferences

Let’s say you are a business that wants to- let’s say you want to go to the upcoming Essence festival that’s going to be in July at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome. For whatever reason, you can’t make it. You just can’t be there. You have too much on your plate but you still want to get your message in front of them. All those event attendees. What would you do? You can utilize geofencing. We come into our platform.

Do the Mercedes Benz Superdome, which is right here in New Orleans. Then, we would come in here and build another digital geofence just around that location. Anybody who goes inside the Superdome now has the I.D. on their smartphone device, and those individuals will see our ads, both while they’re there at the event as well as after they leave the event.

It can be used in a lot of different situations for events, whether it be festivals or parades- conferences are a really, really, really big one. Different events that might be happening. Sporting events, stadiums, really the sky’s the limit, but again, you’re really honing in on your marketing dollars to the people that matter the most to you as an organization. Lastly, I thought this one might also be appropriate.

Geofencing Advertising For Car Dealerships

Let’s say you are a car dealership, and you want to serve ads, or, rather, you want to target your competitor’s locations, and let’s say one of your competitors is- let’s say you’re Rick Hendrick of Chevrolet that’s here in Atlanta Georgia, and instead you want to target Nalley Nissan. You would literally go into the platform, type in Nalley Nissan of Atlanta, do a search for him, and boom, pops up their location, that’s right here off 285.

You go into the platform and build another digital Geofence. You can see I’m getting right into the contours as of that building. At that stage, you can see that everybody that walks inside of that location, we now have the ability to target those individuals, both while they’re there at the dealership as well as after they leave, for up to 30 days. Again, very very powerful stuff.

For us at Propellant Media, as we consider how we leverage white-label geofencing for agencies and marketing firms, we think that your ability to hyper-target and really get incredibly localized with your advertising matters more than anything else. But let’s say you want to take it a step further. Let’s say you really want to understand how effective the advertising is to drive foot traffic back to your location. It’ll be one thing to say, “Oh yes, all these people saw my ads,” and all that’s great.

What Is Geofencing Advertising Usage To Track Online Ads To Offline Foot Traffic

What if you really want to get a sense of how effective it is an what sort of traffic is driving to my location? Well, we have a solution for that too. Let’s say- it’s what we call conversion zone tracking. Conversion zone tracking gives us the ability to do all these different things around geofencing, and then build another, what we call conversion zone, or geofence, directly around our own location. At that point, we now have the ability to track the number of people that saw our ads, clicked on our ads, and then came back to our location.

Let’s say, for example, we just talked about Rick Hendrick of Chevrolet. We do a search, here they go, they are right here. In our platform, in a different location, part of what we’ll do is we will build a conversion zone, you can see this is a different color, the other one was blue. This one is gold. You see this one down here is blue, this one is gold. All the people that have been here, been inside of Nalley Nissan, seen the ads, clicked on the ads, left, went to work, came back, maybe they went back to Nalley Nissan.

But then they kept seeing those ads and the special offers from Rick Hendrick of Chevrolet and they decided to go back to Rick Hendrick of Chevloret or go there to buy a car or to inquire about some of the offers that they have. We can track that within our analytics platform, which is really, really powerful. For us, in our minds, all that matters is not just your being able to hyper-local and hyper-target just the people that you want to get your message in front of, but also your ability to track and measure the success of those campaigns.

That’s what we’re really proud of; that’s the thing that we really get excited about as an agency. If you want to get more reach out of your ad spend, maybe you want to advertise to end market buyers who visit your competitors locations, or maybe there’s an upcoming conference that you want to exhibit at, or that maybe you can attend, but you still want to advertise to those particular attendees, really the sky’s the limit.

A part of our job is to perform the proper market research, put together a really good strategy for you, and ultimately work to improve the return on your investment for any advertising that you would do with that matter. I invite you to learn more about it, schedule a demo, and schedule another call with us. We’re happy to answer any questions that you may have. I hope this was useful and informative. Thank you for taking the time, we really do appreciate. Thanks so much.