Geotargeting 101

 

Imagine being able to target and deliver digital ads to individuals who attended a specific trade show or who walked into a particular shopping center or who visited one of your competitors locations. Sound impossible? Sound too good to be true? It’s not. It’s called geofencing advertising.

With the proliferation of mobile devices and the GPS driven location services that each of these devices carry with them we now have access to and can act on amazing amounts of consumer behavior information.   

Advertisers can draw a virtual fence around building, events, venues, and other very specific parts of a geographic area. Visitors, or more specifically, their mobile phones that pass into these fenced areas are flagged for future marketing efforts. The advertiser can then display their advertisement, offer, or message to the visitor via the same mobile device.

A restaurant, knowing that out of town visitors will need to eat dinner, may geofence nearby hotels and target those staying in the hotels with special offers. Car dealerships can geofence competitor’s car lots and target those visiting those lots with an alternative model of car, special pricing or other incentives. A service provider can geofence trade shows or conferences for industries that they specialize in. There are many applications, but the point is that marketers can reach highly targeted and motivated customers.

There are many geofencing providers and networks. Each has strengths and weaknesses.  Some can set hyper focused boundaries (down to a couple of feet) while others are more broad.  Larger social networks such as Facebook have their own flavor of geofencing and localization.  Some platforms have the ability to cross over to and deliver ads on other advertising platforms.  One example is the ability to display video ads via HULU or other on-demand video services to visitors that entered a geofenced area.

Let’s just say geofencing advertising can be powerful. Contact us today to see if geofencing is a good fit for your digital marketing strategy.