Let’s say a potential customer drives by your dealership every day on their way to and from work; how do you let them know about the discount that you’re running on oil changes when they can use it? Or your restaurant is just around the corner from a busy shopping area, and you’d like to tempt some new customers with a coupon for a free appetizer. These days, we already know that mobile marketing is where it’s at when it comes to finding new customers, with more than 210 million smartphone users in the U.S. alone. But the question remains: What is the best way to reach mobile users who will actually convert into customers?
Geo-fencing is a way to draw a virtual fence around an area and then track when consumers move into or out of it. This can provide valuable information about when consumers are near your business, as well as give you the opportunity to serve targeted display ads to those consumers when they enter the geo-fenced area or at a later time. This helps push your business messages to the people who are most likely to need them—and most likely to take advantage. Because of this, geo-fencing is a powerful tool in your digital marketing toolkit, not to mention a great way to reach consumers who are on the go and give them that little extra push they may need to stop into your store, business, or dealership.
In the past, geo-fencing was largely limited to a radius from a central point. For example, you could set up a geo-fence to reach anyone within 100 yards of your frozen yogurt shop, or within two miles. Of course, the downside of this kind of scattershot approach to geo-fencing is that it also reaches a lot of consumers who probably aren’t interested. Thanks to the advances in geo-fencing technology that are being leveraged by iFocus Marketing and our Spark360 platform, however, we can draw geo-fences in custom sizes and shapes based on the needs of your business and the patterns of customer traffic so that you get more bang for your marketing buck.
Geo-fencing can be used to do more than just erect a virtual fence around your business to help draw in customers, though. With help from the team at iFocus Marketing in Kansas City, you can get creative. If you’re a car dealership, consider setting up a geo-fence to capture customers as they’re leaving rival dealerships in the area and let them know about your latest specials! For more on geo-fencing and location-based technology, and how iFocus can help you put it to work for your business, here’s a quick Q&A with Sydney Feipel, Director of Digital Operations here at iFocus Marketing:
How does iFocus utilize geo-fencing and location-based marketing for its clients?
At iFocus, we use a robust in-house display platform that allows us to pinpoint consumers within feet (and sometimes inches) of their true location based on location data from their mobile device(s). While much of display advertising relies on a radius around a point on a map (which can include several miles of unwanted consumers), we are able to draw custom-sized and shaped geo-fences, allowing us to really hone in on a client’s target consumers. This eliminates many wasted impressions on consumers who don’t care, which ultimately means the client is spending their money on more qualified consumers. Geo-fencing is also quite versatile—we can literally geo-fence anything that has a physical address. This really opens up the possibilities for our clients. From geo-fencing to draw traffic from your competitors, to targeting shopping areas that would have a high concentration of ideal consumers, geo-fencing allows us to offer nearly endless possibilities for our clients.
What services do you apply this to?
Our display platform, Spark360, is really where the bulk of our location-based services are utilized. However, we also implement precise location targeting with our PPC campaigns, and even on social campaigns (primarily on Facebook).
What’s the number one thing you want readers to know about geo-fencing?
The biggest thing that sets us apart is the level of customization that we offer. Many, many companies offer geo-fencing services, but hardly any can offer custom-sized and shaped geo-fences. Again, by offering this to our clients, we’re really able to cut down on wasteful spending and skip straight to hitting consumers with high potential to convert. We refer to this as the sniper approach vs. the shotgun approach.
One other thing that’s cool is that we built Spark360 because of this very problem. Clients were getting frustrated because their money wasn’t being effectively spent in the areas they wanted to target, and so there was a lot of wasted money in the display advertising space as a whole. From the start, we built Spark360 in order to solve that headache for clients. I don’t think any other company can say that.
When used correctly, geo-fencing can be an incredibly powerful digital marketing tool that can help take your business to the next level by reaching customers where they are and when they need your message. To learn more or to see for yourself how geo-fencing and location-based technology can help your business, contact the experts at iFocus Marketing in Kansas City today!
