Digital marketing trends are changing each year, with each trend focusing more and more on customers. The customers’ habits, experience, and satisfaction are all crucial to a successful business.
This is why geofencing is a powerful tool for marketers. It bridges the gap between advertising and action as well as online and offline. It targets the right people, increases sales to physical locations, and more.
However, as geofencing is a newcomer to the marketing scene, many are in doubt about it. If you want to know how it can benefit your business, keep on reading below.
1. Geofencing is Good for Better Targeting
Without geofencing, your digital marketing tactics would only rely on local SEO to target the right people. With it, however, you can target the people nearby your physical locations. You’ll be able to encourage them to go in right there and then.
You can further personalize your messages, depending on what day is it or even what time is it. If it’s lunch hour, for example, you can alert nearby people to come in for lunch. If you’re having a happy hour promo, you can also notify them during those hours.
Anytime a potential customer enters your zone, you can push out any type of message you want them to see. Apart from your current promotions, you can also use it to make announcements. Concert organizers, in particular, can use it to announce the next artist on stage.
2. It Allows You to Reach the Mobile Crowd
Did you know that 82% of smartphone users research on their phone first before buying a product? This is why you might not be able to tap into the passersby who haven’t got the chance to research your store yet.
You can take advantage of this, though, in that you can be right where they’re looking – on their smartphones. Even when they’re not doing research, they’re sure to be checking their mobile phones wherever they are.
An average user checks their phones around 150 times per day. This gives you a good chance of being visible to nearby consumers. You can then take advantage of the fact that many people still like getting to see the product in person instead of clicking a button to buy it.
3. You Get Better Engagement
You can better engage with your customers if you give out information that’s relevant at the time. Remember, you can set up notifications each time a mobile phone enters or exits your mobile fence. You can also track the customer while inside your store, for example.
If a consumer goes in because of the geofence alert and then buys something from the store, you can then set up something like a thank you note once they exit your store. You can use geofencing in a lot of other ways like this one; you’ll only need a creative team.
The good part about this is that it has a snowball effect. Each time you gather data about the habits of your consumers, you get to improve your geofencing techniques. This will then improve your engagement rates.
As long as you put the data you can get from geofencing to good use, you’ll only get good results.
4. Intercept Customers from Nearby Competitors
Want your customers to go to your store instead of a competitor? Your geofence alerts can do that. When the people see you have an ongoing promo, they may instead check you out instead of a rival.
This works like the big displays about promotions and discounts outside or on the window of the shop. The only difference is that you’re putting your display on where people are looking – at their phones.
For geo-conquesting to work, you’ll have to set up a geofence around your competitors instead of in your own shop. Inside this geofence, potential customers will get your alerts when they’re near the rival store or when they do a specific action near it, like the search for a good dinner place on Google.
This leads to up to 30% higher click-through rates than in the standard use of geofencing.
5. You Can Collect Better Data
With geofencing, you can track the customer’s actions after receiving the alerts. Do they walk straight into your store or do they consider it for a bit and then leave without entering?
You’ll also get important information about your customers. You’ll also be able to know things like how long they stayed in your shop and how they moved within your shop.
As you learn more, you’ll know which ones are more approachable and which ones are more likely to respond to your ads. Depending on the data you collect, you can then improve your marketing strategy as a whole.
Apart from these, you can also see which stores are performing better with geofencing marketing. Should you need more data about where you want to put up a store next, the data from geofencing will also help you determine that.
6. It Leads to Better Forecast Demand
With access to valuable data, you can handle sudden spikes better. If you’re in the food business, for example, you’ll be able to manage your inventories based on the amount of traffic. This will then depend on the data about the traffic you’ve gathered.
For the fashion industries and similar ones, they’ll be able to hire more staff at a certain time of the day to make sure they’ll be able to accommodate incoming customers. For groceries, they’ll know when to anticipate more shoppers. This will allow them to know when to open more cashiers.
In summary, geofencing helps them to prepare for the upcoming trends based on the data they’ve gathered with it.
Setting Up a Geofence
Geofencing has become a powerful tool in marketing, but it’s important you only get the right people for the job. Otherwise, you might not be able to reap its benefits. To learn more about it, don’t hesitate to contact us today.
