Geofencing Technology : Taking SMS Marketing to the Next Level

 Geofencing has been taken to next level with Mobile marketing which gives various businesses the ability to closely target their customers on their current location and time within a certain geographic radius. The popularity of mobile devices and smartphones now makes Geofencing technology incredibly valuable as a marketing tool for business owners. Geofencing offers a lot of options and benefits for mobile users, from various shopping offers to off season offers and much more. This technology uses IP addresses to figure out where users are.

Benefits of Geofencing for Marketing

• Enhance Local Sales

• Increase Analytics and Tools for Metric Analysis

• Provide Personalization for Customers

Benefits of Using Mobile Advertising

Retailers, small scale businesses, large scale businesses and any other sort of businesses, use plenty of different ways to advertise their business. While traditional marketing and advertising for business is always one of the most important parts of the advertising, there are a few other ways of advertising that can help any business grow locally in just a matter of time.

One of the best ways to advertise your business locally is by using mobile advertising. The mobile advertising may comprise of ads in smartphones, push notifications or text messages, and these different ways of advertising can actually help you to a great extent. There are a lot of benefits of using the mobile advertising for your business. They are –

1.    Reach out to people the right way – There are a very few people who don’t use a mobile or a smartphone. Using the mobile advertising can be really helpful because people are always accessing their phone and when they get an SMS or a push notification about your services or products, they take their time to notice the same and that is the best thing about this service. Another thing that you should keep in mind is that your mobile advertising follows the consumers wherever they go. They don’t have to be in just one place in order to get the SMS notification.

2.    The size of the medium – According to a recent survey, Seventy-five percent of people own mobile phones, and 55 million of those are smart phones and more people will access the internet by phone than by computer. If you need to market to the general public, mobile advertising offers you an effective way to reach large numbers of people.

3.    They are more personal – Sending an SMS to your consumer via mobile advertising can be a great way to please your consumers with exciting offers as it is more personal and people concentrate more on things that are beneficial for them. These are personalize texts and offers specially personalized for the consumers based on their likes and dislikes and when you send an offer that attracts them, it helps your business to a great extent.

4.    Time relevant – It doesn’t take much time for someone to read a text. It can be done within a few minutes and that is one of the best things about the mobile advertising.

5.    Cost effective – The mobile advertising cost nothing close to what radio and television advertising might cost you. so it is indeed a great way of advertising your business.

Geo fencing and its effects on your business

There is no doubt that technology has emerged to a great level and the world of advertising is highly under the influence of these latest technologies.

As a marketer, you probably look out for various ways to do more and more advertising for your small scale business. And as technology is highly beneficial nowadays, people no longer solely rely on just traditional marketing. One of the best thing technology provided the mankind is the benefit of using smartphone geofencing in your daily life in order to bring differences in your marketing strategies.

The geofencing effect on your business is amazing as it can improve your store’s visibility or popularity locally. Why – because the personalized texts you send to their phones about various offers and coupons and discounts about your business, help them remember the name of the store to a great extent.

People often use their mobiles on the go. So when they enter your particular fence, they get a message from your store regarding the offers or services you are providing. This helps them at least “think” about your store – so even if they are at your competitor’s store, and you have set your fence at your competitor’s store, you get two things as a benefit – a real time data on how many customers visit their store on a daily basis, and the other is you can tell those potential customers about your products and services.

Geo fencing has helped a lot of businesses to a great extent. Not only because it does advertising for their business; but also because it gives them a real time data about their visitor’s on a daily basis.

There are a few ways through which you can improve your geo fencing experience. They are –

1.    The text messages you send to your customers should be quite relevant and appealing. They should contain the right information on a right manner and you shouldn’t be beating around the bush. As most times the customers are on the go, so they don’t really have much time to read the whole text and therefore the text should be small enough and should contain highlighted and the most important parts.

2.    You should know how and where to geo fence. Sending a targeted offering in the parking lot could steer a customer away from a competitor. You can get even more creative and a florist could target a chocolate or dessert business nearby with the reasoning that if a person is buying chocolate, they might also want to buy flowers.

Secrets to a Successful Geo Fence Campaign

You already have got a fair idea what we are going to talk about. That is – geo fencing. Geo fencing is one of the most used and popular ways through which marketers can do different kinds of marketing campaigns – unique and different from the rests.

You can see that most of your customers use the smartphones – whether it is an android one or an iPhone, not a single person can live without any kind of digital devices. And that is when you can take the advantage of these situations by incorporating the geo fencing marketing campaigns for the business you are running.

So how does it work?

Before you ask that, the question should be how do you effectively do that?  Smart marketers build geo fences around key physical sites: stores, arenas, airports, schools, even competitor outlets.

These fences create zones that trigger an SMS message or other action when a customer enters or leaves. And this is what is called geofencing. Although it is new in mobile marketing, and there are some important secrets to getting right.

There are a few ways you can make it right. Here are a few ways you can make it right –

1.    Do not make the fence big – It is very important you should make sure that the fence you are creating isn’t that big. By the definition you already know that geo fence is all about the size and the shape. So you always need to make sure that the geo fence is small and relevant.

2.    Set the geo fence only where it is relevant – When you set up a geo fence, you need to make sure that the geo fence is set where your customers are. By doing that, you make sure that you are improving the marketing ROI and that exactly what you need for your business. That means, the geo fence isn’t necessarily has to be round your store. It can be near your competitor’s store, near the airport, near another neighbourhood and many others.

3.    Don’t use blend messages – If your message is an ad versus an action, you will not drive the customer behaviour you desire. You are not alone in your geo fence aspirations. More than half of the people in US are using Geo fencing.  Your message must be brief, be locally-relevant and prompt action.  And money always drives action: do not be cheap.

3 Ways to Make Geo-Fencing Work for Your Business

If you have a small scale business say – a coffee shop, a fashion hub, a takeaway joint or maybe a small pub, pretty sure you have heard of the term “geo-fencing”. Maybe read it in the internet or maybe your friends have mentioned about it earlier, but geo-fencing sounds pretty familiar to you isn’t it?

So what is geo-fencing?

Geo-fencing is a feature in a software program that uses the global positioning system (GPS) or radio frequency identification (RFID) to define geographical boundaries.

You can use geo-fencing as a mobile display advertising tactic which allows you to target users who enter a specific area around a location like your business or your competitor’s business and show your ad on their mobile device.

There are a few ways or techniques of the geofencing marketing which can help your business grow better and faster.

Here are those techniques –

1.    Target your rival’s customers – When you are in a business, you must know what your rivals and competitors are doing – who are visiting their shops – what makes your rival’s shop better than yours. These things are really very important for you and you must take a look on these things. Targeting your rivals’ customers will help you get those customers. Let’s say there are a few potential customers for your business and they visit your rival’s shop most of the times. What can you do in that case is whenever they are in your rival’s shop, you can send notifications or messages offering 20%-30% discounts on the same services. The customers will be definitely affected by this.

2.    Target the people who are near your business location – Geo-fencing is all about targeting the people around you. When you have a business at one particular place, and you are new, not many people know about your shop, what you can do is, rather than investing a lot of money in the traditional advertising, you can spend a little money on geo-fencing, target the people around the 20mile radius of your storefront and send them relevant texts related to various offers your business provides. This way, although not much people will be covered, at least people who can actually be your potential customers will be targeted and you will be more benefited.

3.    Target patron of your relative business – When you target your rival’s customers, you can also target the other relevant businesses. For example, if you are an insurance agent, you may target a nearby car dealership or apartment complex so new car owners or new renters can see your ads and call you for their insurance needs. Think about businesses that may complement yours and target their customers to drive more new customers to your business.