Geofencing is becoming increasingly popular as a digital advertising tactic, but the true power of it is still vastly underutilised. If you’ve ever wondered just what geofencing could do for you, here are 5 ideas to inspire.

1. Target By Interest

You might have profiled your customers by demographics, but have you gone deeper into who they are and what their interests might be? And have you then considered how you could utilise this knowledge to best effect? Geofencing opens many doors here.

One of the main benefits of geofencing ads is that you can identify a user’s interests based on their physical location at any given time. If you want to target someone who loves rock music, for example, then geofence your local arena next time a rock act is on there. If you want to target someone who loves football, then geofence the next Saturday kick off at your local stadium. Whatever the event, if it will entice the people that you want to target then you can geofence it with ease and get your ad in front of them.

2. Competitive Advantage

A strategically placed geofence around a competitor’s location with a well-timed and enticing offer could be enough to get their customers spending money with you instead. Whether your competitor is down the road or at the other end of the country, geofencing has a world of opportunities.

This works extremely well within the retail industry, but as long as your competitor has a physical location that your prospective customers visit, then it could be a very savvy tactic to employ.

3. Think Small

It’s not often that marketing people are told to think small, but when it comes to geofencing, less is definitely more.

Our geofencing tool offers pinpoint accuracy. For geofencing to work well, you need to work within a close radius around your defined location.

We always like to abide by the five minute rule. When you’re in a city and most customers walk to you, keep your fence to a five minute walking radius. For businesses out of town where customers usually drive, keep it to a five minute driving radius. You want to make sure that every eye that sees your ad is a potential customer for you. With such great accuracy, there’s no reason to cast your net wide. If you have a really good idea of how you can use geofencing, then don’t be afraid to be really focused.

4. A Brand New Audience

One of the most exciting and powerful elements of geofencing is that it can allow you to tap into an audience that doesn’t even know they need you. We call this the “passive audience”.

The Health in Justice project we worked on with Practice Plus Group explains this well. They were trying to recruit for hard to fill roles and their application numbers were low. Working with them, we geofenced areas such as the car parks where people who were already doing a similar job worked.

While they might not have been actively looking for another job, by cleverly advertising new opportunities to them at the end of a hard day, when they’re walking back to their car, we were able to entice some people into applying who may not have even considered it otherwise.

And even if the positive action didn’t happen straight away, you’re suddenly on the radar of a potential customer that wouldn’t have looked otherwise. Using geofencing creatively, you can open up a whole new potential audience. The sky’s the limit!

5. Layer Demographics

Not only can you be incredibly targeted with geofencing geographically, but there are also lots of options for how choosy you can be with who you target personally. If you know you want to target males, in a certain location, aged over 40, who have an interest in cricket, and that work in a full time job, then all of that is possible. Your budgets stretch so much further as you’re only advertising to the people that really matter.

‍Interested in what geofencing can do for you?

We will be attending the Marketing Showcase events this year in Birmingham, Manchester and London, and we’ll be doing live interactive demonstrations of how geofencing can work based on anyone’s bespoke criteria. If you’d like to see first hand just what it could do for you, please do pop by our stand.

Alternatively, book in a call with Emma and she’ll be able to tell you more.