If we explain the word “geofencing”, it is creating a fence or marking a boundary over a specific location on geo or Earth. In marketing terminology, geofencing refers to pitching your brand to a group of people or audience in a specific location.
However, for marketers, geofencing is not just about targeting people in a country, state, zip code, or location. It is also about the traits of their exact audience or buyer persona – such as competitions’ customers, buying history, web or mobile browsing trends, preferences, interests, age, and gender.
Geofencing and eCommerce
E-Commerce industry, which was going through a great hardship due to users’ privacy and financial security concerns at the beginning of the last decade, has already started leveraging geofencing to reach new customers; establish a healthy but a tough competition; and set new sales records.
According to a report, “51% of smart phone users have discovered a new company or product conducting a search on their smart phone.”
If users can find or locate a company, product, or service they need, why can’t a company or marketer locate customer(s) for their product? Geofencing allows for that with the help of new-age marketing tools and techniques.
While 77% of Americans have a smart phone, the percentage of companies using geofencing or hyper-local targeting is just 22%. However, that report was published 3 years back and the figures have definitely gone up, but a large number of companies are still unaware of or do not have any geofencing strategy.
Your marketing goldmine is a geofence away, and you can give your ecommerce sales a kick-start or a quick boost with the help of these geofencing strategies –
Fence it Right –
When you are developing a geofencing marketing strategy, you ought to focus on selecting the right fencing or location. And when we talk about the right location, we must mention the size of the fencing.
The best practice is to make it easier for your prospects to locate you. Don’t get too excited to widen your fence in order to gain more impressions or views. Oversized geofences do not drive expected results. They, on the other hand, often turn into an overburdened outlay for the marketer.
E-commerce stores can include offers – like free shipping; entry pass for nearby trade shows where they would be having a stall; and festive discounts for specific locations or audiences – in their geofencing strategy.
Find the Right Audience –
Finding the right audience is a crucial step, because you don’t want to show your ads to (a group of) users that do not need your product and aren’t willing to convert.
To get your geofencing work, you will also need to shift your focus on locating the audience who you want to show your ads or campaigns – the ones who fit into your buyer persona. For this, you first need to understand who your audience is.
Like iCustomLabel that offers customized sticker and labels in bulk the right audience would be product manufacturers, gift shops, and companies and individuals that organize public events. They have a broad horizon to scan, so they can create small audience groups based on industry, country, state, city, or zip code for their geofencing campaigns.
Get Social –
Social networks are the real platform to formulate your geofencing strategies. In past few years, social media marketing has become more effective marketing tool than search engine marketing.
People spend more time on social media than they do on search engines. Although social media and search engine go hand in hand, the former proves to be easier and more logical to work with. Not only does it allow you to connect with your customers and prospects, but also enables to your target your updates and ads for specific audiences and locations.
So, if you do not have a social media strategy yet, it is time. But, remember, search engine marketing and social media marketing work together. So work on both.
Create Ads that Encourage Audience to Take Action –
CTA 1 – Get FLAT 50% Discount, Today Only!
CTA 2 – Book Your Order Today to Get 50% Discount!
Which CTA do you think is more actionable? Of course, the first one. Why? Because, it summarizes the discount information. Plus, it encourages the users to buy today only!
No matter how great your ad is, how beautiful your model is, how much you have paid the photographer, how many hours you have spent on the ad development, if it does not have an actionable CTA, your campaign will lack on the performance part.
Without any CTA or with an ambiguous CTA, your audience will have no idea what to do after seeing your ad.
You will need to tell them through your strong, actionable call to action. Learn to create killer CTAs, because your calls to action have a great influence on your audience.
Analyze –
How well did your previous hyperlocal ad campaign perform? It is the job of every marketer to know how many users –
- Took an action on their ad
- Followed the link they were asked to click
- Signed up to subscribe or take their product or service
- Reported their ad as spam and useful
You will also need to understand and analyze –
- The locations or audience groups didn’t work last time
- The audience that responded well, so you can retarget them in your future campaigns
Do evaluate the performance of your each campaign. New-generation marketing channels – be it social networks, search engines or email marketing tools – come win inbuilt analytics feature to help you understand the insights related to the performance of your ads. This very feature gives you a chance to alter your future strategies, exclude all non-performing factors, and save your expenditure.
Bottom Line –
With geofencing, you can increase customer loyalty and improve user engagement by showing the right ad to the right person in the right location. You also benefit from the power of advanced analytics to target and retarget your audience groups.
Geofencing approaches as a cost-effective way to increase the reach and sales of your ecommerce business by excluding the user groups or locations that do not respond well.
All you have to do is to have a presence on social media, a strong presence, and an effective geofencing marketing strategy.
