Need & Importance of Geofencing and its Various Benefits

Geo fencing has been considered pretty important for a long time now and there are plenty of things and places or business organizations which probably won’t be able to survive properly if there is no Geofencing facility.

The Geofencing or the mobile Geofencing technology is one of the most wanted and needed technology so far. There are plenty of things that you can do with the help of Geofencing and a there are a lot of advantages of using the same.

What exactly is Geofencing?

According to the definition, Geofencing is basically the use of GPS or RFID technology to create a virtual geographic boundary, enabling software to trigger a response when a mobile device enters or leaves a particular area.

So when you use Geofencing, you basically understand and know what are the places of interest near you; or people can get a track of the things or the services near them. As for a business, Geofencing technology helps the businesses keep a track of their customers and that way they can increase the visibility of their shops and services.

Advantages –

There are a lot of advantages of using Geofencing services. Here are a few just to keep you updated –

1.    For a business, it helps them get better visibility in the market. For example, if a customer is using the Geofencing service, he/she gets notified whenever they come across any shops or business premises. This way, your shops comes to the customer’s notice and you can get a chance to sell your products faster than those businesses, who don’t use the service of Geofencing. 

2.    If as a business, you are using the Geofencing service, it helps you keep a track of your customer. You can understand what kind of customers you have; you can keep a track of your customer’s whereabouts, their footfalls, how many times they have visited your store, or their buying capacity.

3.    When used properly, Geofencing can also help you gather information about your rivals’ sale data and the use them in order to improve your business. However, you must make sure to use the right technique if you are looking for results.

There are plenty of ways Geofencing helps you gather a lot of benefits. However, you need to make sure that you are using the Geofencing the right way. You need to make sure that the Geofence or the area covered through the Geo-fence isn’t a vast one and you need to inform your customers prior that Geofence has been used.

Things to Consider Before Buying a Geo Fencing Platform

Geofencing has become a growing popular concept which has aided specially in marketing business in the 21st century. Though the technologies that has been used in geofencing has been around from a very long time, until recently, when its potential is realized, geofencing has been taking a boom.

What is geo fencing? In simple world, you can call it as marking a virtual parameter or boundary around a geographical area. This boundary has no physical existence except in terms of its application in various technology. For example, a restaurant could give out message about its social dish if the day, through this system to the mobile of the people who are passing by it. Hence, in marketing, it has become an essential tool.

Though it sounds very promising from above, there are various things you need to consider if you want to opt one. There are various geofencing marketing companies but not all of them provide the same quality. Moreover, different business will need different strategies and hence, these platforms will also very depending upon the application.

1.    Shape: This is perhaps one of the most important criteria while choosing a platform. You should ask questions to know about what type of shape they can build so that you could know about the parameters beforehand and hence come up with a strategy. If the platform provides shapes which are different, then it can play a key aspect.

2.    Provision to monitor multiple locations at the same instant: The ability to monitor multiple locations could add lots of benefits to the system. Many platform providers have limitation in this aspect and while choosing one, you should give preference to the one which promises to give multiple locations to be monitored at the same instant.

3.    Building geofencing from physical address: This is another key aspect. The platform provider should have the ability to build the geofencing by just getting the list of the physical addresses. As a client, you don’t need to know the latitude or longitude of the places. Rather, it’s the responsibility of the provider to mark the boundary of the geofencing based upon the addresses.

4.    User friendly mobile application: The app should be built in such a way that, it doesn’t need to be opened all the time, thus saving battery and runs as low resource background process which creates a trigger based upon the event. By this, you won’t be putting too much pressure in the batteries of the mobiles yet, it doesn’t put ant hindrance to your service.

5.    Limit server callbacks: The API of the app should be made such a way that it shouldn’t make excessive calls to the server or else, a congestion may happen.

How to Maximize the Effects of Geo Fencing Marketing

When you want to maximize the effect of your customized, and targeted marketing strategies, the geography plays a huge role on that part and you should be taking really, really good care of that particular part.

One of the most exciting and useful targeted marketing strategies is the geo fencing marketing. This targeted marketing strategy has helped a lot of business grow locally and now several others are using the same to gather the benefits.

However, there are plenty of ways you can maximize the effect of geofencing.

Here are those –

•    Find the venue where your targeted audiences have specific needs or wants – Stadiums, airports, universities, airports, and malls are examples of specific venues that can be targeted in order to reach specific interest groups. Stadiums provide a great opportunity to focus on specific short engagement events with an audience defined by that event. They often host fans from two specific cities or schools or fans of a specific music genre that is heavy in one demographic. Use these kinds of characteristics of the consumers to make your geofencing more effective. For example, you can set up your geofence in a crowded airport on weekends. Or in a famous restaurant where everyday a lot of people come to dine. This is an amazing way to boost your geofencing marketing strategy.

•    Exclude places where you know your target audience will not be – Do not put geo fencing on places where your targeted audiences are less likely to be there. Excluding these places will also prove to be cost effective and pretty beneficial for you because there is no use of targeting audience who are not going to be a part of your business.

•    Use of location specific keywords – Geo targeting doesn’t always mean you have to capture where someone is physically located. Consumer intent is conveyed all the time by search queries, and location is a commonly included term. Consumers often narrow their own searches by adding in the name of a city or district.

•    Analyze your customer’s behavior – When you have already used geo fencing before, you can surely come to know about your customer’s behavior and attitude, and for how many times they have visited that particular place etc, etc. Analyze your customers’ behavior with this information. and use the same for future references and better results.