Should You Consider Geofencing As Part Of Your Digital Strategy?

Imagine the possibility of drawing a line around a specific location (like a business, convention center, hotel, event or even a competitor) and being able to serve people highly customized ads directly to their cell phone. That is what geofencing (also known as Location-Based Advertising) allows marketers to do. While the technology has existed for some time, the increased role that mobile plays in the buying process has caused this strategy to become more prevalent in recent years. Before we discuss some of the advantages of geofencing, let’s talk about what it is. First of all, geofencing is not geotargeting, which targets end users in a relatively large geographic area, (think zip codes, cities, regions, etc.). Instead, geofencing focuses on a much smaller radius. It allows marketers to draw a boundary around a specific address and serve ads to an individual's mobile device by utilizing GPS, RFID, Wi-Fi, or cellular data once they have entered that “fence.” As a result, the ads are served on thousands of mobile apps and websites. There are several benefits that a well-grounded geofence strategy can provide for your overall digital strategy. For the sake of brevity, I will focus on 3:

• Personalization of messaging to an audience

Imagine that you are a medical device company and want to target a convention that 50,000 medical professionals will attend. Using geofencing, you have the ability to cater your message to specifically mention that individual conference. This allows your message to break through the digital noise because of the relevance to that individual person!

• Target a large audience based upon behavior

While traditional marketing allows for targeting down to a radius of a zip code, city, or region, geofencing allows you to hyper target within 1 meter of an address. This allows you literally to target one building, and not the other. Imagine being able to target a single office building in an entire office park.

• Low cost to show ads

Generally, geofencing is based upon a CPM model (cost per thousand impressions). This allows a marketer to show thousands of ads to their targeted audience, and also allows marketers to better calculate their marketing budgets because of less variance in spend. Geofencing, like so many other tactics in digital, should never be considered as a stand alone strategy. It can be an effective tool in the digital marketer’s tool belt and should be used in conjunction with several other strategies to create a comprehensive digital marketing plan.

Do you want to use geofencing to take your digital strategy to the next level? Talk to an expert today!

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