Geofencing in business
Along with many other modern techniques, geofencing has found multiple applications in many fields, such as security, management, trade, and business in general. Many companies now who want to order a customized mobile app development to expand their presence in the market are also interested in adding geofencing features to the final product. Application development companies, like owlab.group, provide various solutions on the location-based tools for your business. Geofencing is a term that is a system of pre-programmed actions with a specific purpose that triggers sending different notifications to authorizes GPS-based gadgets as they enter a specific location. Geofence is a system of virtual boundaries within a specific zone. So, let’s at first analyze the definition of the mentioned terms and their interpretation in the business world.
What is geofencing in marketing?
This form of marketing allows companies to target their potential audience. Geofencing marketing is a specific location-based advertising strategy that allows marketing experts to operate in a specific area. And, by geofence here, we mean, first of all, physical boundaries of a specific geographic zone. The evidence can have different sizes and features. Sometimes, it’s the whole country, region, district, or block of the city or town. But sometimes it is situated within a walking distance from a specific shop, restaurant, hotel, or any other business location. Often multiple locations are targeted. In this way, geofencing marketing can be characterized as a business activity aimed to engage the audience who live, work, or simply walk or drive past the chosen area. Every internet-capable device is targeted within a given area, by sending them push notifications, messages on social networks, alerts, and selling offer in order to involve potential customers into the interaction with brands.
Geofencing-based strategies
Within this strategy company’s marketing department creates advertising content and customizes it for the customers present in the specific area. What is specific for location-based marketing, is that through this strategy businesses clarify their audience even more precisely, as the needs of the same group of customers in Tokyo will have different needs, in comparison to the other big city in Japan. Besides, geographically many ethnical groups occupy specific areas, so targeting them needs a completely different analysis and further strategic planning in comparison to the other audience within a distance of several miles. At the same time, this technology is highly beneficial for mass-market offers, as it can be tuned to cover all the visitors to a specified area and deliver a value proposition to larger groups of people.
The main forms of geofencing marketing
Being applicable almost in every field of business, geofencing can have different configurations based on the goals. So, let’s look at how its form differs as we compare various ways of application:
– Many businesses target not only their nearby area but also the areas of their competitors. So, in this way, they can easily target the customers who are already interested in their services and goods but simply haven’t come across them, as a potential buyer. In other words, they can easily stop the customers halfway to choose their competitor and make them switch before they have taken a final purchase decision. It’s a common strategy for restaurants and hotels sharing a location with their direct competitors. Besides, smaller geofence provides a more precise approach to marketing, when you establish a connection with your audience on the personal, one-to-one level. This is a very good strategy to boost your brand awareness when customers easily link your concept to your offline.
– Many service-oriented businesses operate in a complete red ocean, where their competitors are very close, even in the means of the location. Dentists’ offices, law firms, beauty services, they all exist in the conditions of heavy competition. So many of them can specify smaller geofence area, or target the areas of their potential customers, such as business centers, malls, universities.
– New businesses can successfully use geofencing for audience analysis and gather marketing information easily to transform it into a successful marketing strategy. The companies only planning to set a shop in a specified area, can easily estimate the ROI before making heavy investments. Trying different locations and analyzing the customers’ response, they can quickly choose the most relevant ones and make the process of audience analysis more effort and cost-efficient. Geofencing easily boosts data-gathering processes. The data you collect is detailed and accurate. The geofencing marketing campaigns are easier to organize, handle, and repeat in the case of need in comparison to other digital marketing campaigns. The main information you can collect is about the message effectiveness, general effectiveness of the campaign, visit frequency and visit duration of your customers, and so on.
– Time-limited events and sales can take great advantage of geofencing, as it allows us to deliver the marketing content quickly and at the right time. In comparison to the marketing campaign on social media and with the assistance of influencers, it’s a very cheap means of advertising. Besides, if to estimate the audience’s response to the campaign, geofencing is more affective. The issue is that on social media we can cover the users who are not very appropriate, as they may have mentioned their location in the wrong way. In other words, many potential users sore not taking into account while we concentrate on those who are not going to enter a funnel. But with geofencing, promotions, new product arrivals, limited sales campaigns, and shop openings are the right places to use this incredible technology.
Summary
In any case, every brand nowadays should understand how the geofencing works and the advantages it can bring. Connecting digital and physical presence in the market now, especially when you target different segments is a very hard activity. A proper marketing strategy will certainly help, and geofencing will let you develop this strategy quickly and with less physical and financial effort. It has shown good results in both short-term and long-term variations. The more you use it, the easier you can build a local brand within a shorter period of time. So, if you haven’t applied this technology in your business, it the right time to do it.
