What is geofencing marketing?
Geofencing has become a powerful ally of some of the most established and renowned business markets in the world. Companies ranging from super-chain restaurants to legendary live music venues have been taking advantage of this flawless and silent data scraping technique. An increase in sales, marketing, and customer identification is the driving factor in geofencing becoming such a popular marketing tactic.
Geofencing is the act of setting up a GPS based perimeter and using it in a myriad of different ways to interact with customers who are inside of the perimeter. Figuring out where customers are is a significant first step in knowing how to interact with them. A geofence can be used to help not only business growth but ensure customers are given satisfying benefits and feel individually appreciated. Geofence marketing can range from collecting data exchanged inside of the geofence to sending location specific benefits to customers who are inside of the geofence. Geofence marketing is a very useful tactic when dealing with location specific services such as stores, and can completely change the way customers are marketed to and interacted with.
For example, a geofence could be set up surrounding a physical store location and then when a customer drives or walks through the geofence a notification could be sent to them offering rewards. This would make them more likely to enter into the store than they would have been before, AND the store is seen right as they drive by. Geofence advertising is a compelling new way to not only see where customers are, but to understand their habits.
Even if a customer didn’t choose to stop by the store after seeing the notification, setting up a geofence and monitoring it is a powerful tool in itself. Monitoring geofence activity allows the store to see exactly who, when, where, and why a customer passed through their geofence. This makes geofencing marketing a powerful form of passive data collection as well. With this large amount of data, companies can run better marketing campaigns and run more individualized advertisement. This is a very classic and elementary case of business use of geofencing and geofence marketing, but the ability to scrape data from geofence perimeters goes far beyond even this.
A great example is the heavily popularized industry of live music. When artists come to town to perform at a venue, the entire venue is contained within a geofence. Using the geofence, the fan’s social media accounts can then be scraped for information. This will bring about a greater understanding of what the fans of that artist enjoy and share in common. This opens the door for extremely powerful, curated, and personal advertisements to be run. The draw to geofencing is that it is passive and requires the consumer to do nothing that they weren’t going to do anyway. Instead of asking someone to type in a hashtag, you just let them do whatever they want. This is the same reason why Facebook’s data gathering is unparalleled. Now with geofence marketing, that ability to scrape data with no effort is becoming available to everyone.