You might have heard the term “geofencing” before, but if you haven’t, you should know that it’s a marketing technique you might find to be very helpful. If your business needs sales to boost, you can implement geofencing and see a surge like you never have before.
We’ll explain how geofencing works in this article, and we’ll also talk about how you can tell if your business can benefit from it.
Let’s start with the Geofencing definition.
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When you implement geofence targeting, then, essentially, what you are doing is making likely customers aware that they are near your physical location and that you have products they might potentially want. It’s a marketing method that works in real-time.
Geofencing is a method by which you send promotions, sales, and ad messages directly to smart devices that are physically close to your business. Because of this, geofencing will work best for you if you have a physical location. It will not work if you have a strictly eCommerce business model, as some companies do these days.
Is Geofencing Pretty Effective?
Various entities have studied geofencing to see how effective it is. These studies generally show that when you try out geofencing for your business, you get many more customers than you usually would.
In other words, because you’re using ads that target individuals within a few blocks of your physical store, that makes them aware of it, and they are liable to visit and buy something from you.
How Can You Make It More Likely that Your Geofence Marketing Efforts Will Work?
When you spend money on an ad campaign for your business, it pays to target individuals who you feel are the most likely to buy. You can do that in a few different ways.
For instance, you can do email marketing that targets individuals who have bought from your company before. If they bought something once, it makes sense that they would do so again.
You can also do email marketing based on the addresses you got from individuals who visited your site and signed up for a mailing list. Again, if they visited your site and expressed an interest in your products in the past, this is a potential customer that you need to target.
With geotargeting, you’re not banking on an individual being a likely buyer until they’re within a couple of blocks of your physical store. Once that happens, you can reach out to them and entice them with a particularly discounted product or sale offer.
You can also make it time-sensitive. For example, you might tell the would-be customer that the sale is only going on for the next few hours. Because the extremely discounted items are time-sensitive, you might encourage someone to visit the store and buy who would not otherwise have done so.
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Part of the reason why geofencing is catching on with some businesses is that they might not have a great deal of money in their ad budget. They can’t afford to cast an extensive net to bring in as many customers as they can out of the general population.
As a business, you need to maximize your ad dollars. You have to pay to use the geofencing technique, but you’re liable to get more back from what you spend because the individual you’re targeting is within a few block radius of your store location.
How To Turn Your Geofencing Cost-effective Solution?
You can make it even more likely that the person will come to your store once you advertise to them if you also merge your geofencing with SEO elements. For instance, you can set up a geofencing system whereby you not only won’t advertise to anyone who’s more than a few blocks from your store. You’ll also only set up the ad to appear if the individual types a specific keyword or keyword string into their smart device.
If you’re selling clothing, and someone types “socks near me” into their smartphone from three blocks away, that’s a potential customer you cannot afford to miss. You’ll hit the smartphone user with an ad and get them to come to visit your store and potentially buy from you.
Wrapping It Up:
You can set up your geofencing system in a block, or three blocks, or further than that. The further you cast the net, the more likely it is you will boost your sales. If your numbers are lagging, this can be a targeted way to finish a sales period strong that studies show can work.
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