Marketing In the Flow Of Life
Imagine if you could hit your potential customers with a flash sale exactly when they pass by your store. Or, if you could release ads to all the offices near your restaurant right as happy hour starts. Better yet, what if you could stop people in their tracks as they were headed to your competitor and make them turn around and go to your store instead? All of that is possible with geofencing marketing, and more.
What Is Geofencing?
Geofencing is location-based marketing at its finest. And, as with the best marketing methods, it begins and ends with data.
A geofence is, in essence, a digital fence or perimeter that surrounds an area. That area can be as precise as one building or a section of a city. It can encompass an entire convention center, music arena, or shopping district.
When a person enters a geofenced area, their smart device receives hyper-targeted ads that are specific to that area. These ads can appear on websites they're viewing, social media, or as push notifications. They can offer specials or include directions to a location.
With advanced geofencing technologies, algorithms crosscheck multiple data inputs in milliseconds to verify that the location of the user is accurate (so you make the most use of your marketing dollars).
The best technologies go further, pairing location data with a person's past behavioral patterns and demographics to create different audience profiles. From there, businesses can select segmented audiences that best fit their target customers to serve their ads to. Weather-triggered ads can also tap into consumers' moods right in the moment to provide contextually relevant and tailored messages to local customers.
How Does Geofencing Marketing Work?
Phew. That was a lot and it's all super TechnicalTM but examples can really illustrate how powerful this technology is.
Consider this: Lizzo is playing a show in your city. There is all the self-love, positive vibes going 'round. There are hundreds and hundreds of fans in one venue. With geofencing technology, that positivity can go on long after the show.
First, businesses could target the venue area to create an audience to use either immediately after the show or in the days following it. For example, if you were a nearby bar, you could send targeted ads for half-off Lizzo-inspired cocktails after the show or a reverse happy hour ad right when the curtains close.
If you know the Millennial/Gen Z demographic hanging out at the Lizzo show are your target customers, you can send them ads in the weeks following the show. From yoga studios with body positivity messaging to local apartment complexes and more, there are so many opportunities to now connect with this hyper-targeted audience.
Or, consider how a baby clothing store could create a targeted audience based on the customers who have shopped before in their store. If they wanted to increase repeat visits, they could target that same customer base with BOGO sales offers or other promos on weekend mornings or their other high-traffic sales times.
And another: A microbrewery knows that happy hour is their busiest time, but they also know that the brewery a few blocks away gets more business. With competitive conquesting technology, they could target the audience of people who had visited the other brewery in the past and send after-work happy hour promos directly to their smart devices.
Find Your Customers
Geofencing marketing may be the closest thing we have to marketing in the flow of life. It gets your ads to the customers who are most likely to make use of them. It's powerful. It's more efficient. And even better, it works.
Ready to get started? So are we. At RUNN Media, we are seriously all about data-driven technologies like geofencing. Get in touch with our team today to learn more about how geofencing marketing could help you bring customers right to your doors.