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.

Tricks to Make Your Geofencing Work Better and Faster

The businesses these days use the geofencing technology in order to gain popularity among the locality. The technology has become quite popular among everyone due to various reasons and the benefits that it offers. However, there are a few tricks and tips to make you geofencing work better and faster.

The geofencing technology is one of the most popular technologies that people use to advertise their business. The best thing about the geofencing services is that it is much more cost effective than other advertising methods and it provides you better results.

What is geofencing?

Geo fencing is basically a virtual fence created by the marketers. According to the definition of geofencing, “A geo-fence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. A geo-fence could be dynamically generated—as in a radius around a store or point location, or a geo-fence can be a predefined set of boundaries, like school attendance zones or neighborhood boundaries.”

There are plenty of ways one can improve the benefits of geofencing technology. The marketers use some of the basic ways to use geofencing. But, if you are looking for a proper result for your geofencing, you need to use some of the best trick to use the service.

Apart from using geofencing near your shop, here are a few refreshed and different ways you can interest your customers with different ideas –

•    Use geofencing near your competitor’s store. This way you can interest your customers with various deals and offers from your shop whenever some customer is visiting their shop. This is a great way to advertise your different deals and offers. Most importantly, when you use geo fencing near your competitor’s store, and if you are providing an offer your competitor isn’t, that will make the customer move to your store.

•    Geofencing can also be used near a popular space. For example, if you create the virtual fence near a popular mall, or a move theater of a restaurant, it will be very beneficial for you. The more and more people visit such places, the more they will know about your business and your services. This is a great way to let someone know about your product and services.

•    Think out of the box and use geofencing near a particular crowded area. For example in an airport during the time of holidays like Christmas. If you have any kind of offers during the holidays, such use of geofencing can help your business to a great extent.

•    Do not create the fence too big or too small. Use the right size.

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.

What are the benefits of Mobile Geofencing Service for Logistic Companies?

Geo fencing is one of the most used ways to advertise your business locally and there are a lot of small scale businesses, who use the service of geo fencing. However, it isn’t just the small scale business, but even the large scale businesses too love to use geo fencing because of its variety of benefits.

Since most of the people nowadays are using this amazing new tactic of advertising a business, it is worth exploring now and also to understand how it works.

So what is geo fencing?

Geo-fencing (geofencing) is a feature in a software program that uses the global positioning system (GPS) or radio frequency identification (RFID) to define geographical boundaries. ... Active geofence requires an end user to opt-in to location services and a mobile app to be open.

This amazing tactic helps the local business to grow and make it easier for them to be a known business body in the locality.

There are a lot of benefits for the logistics companies, if they use the mobile geo fencing services. The reason behind is if they use the geofencing service, it helps them keep a track of their things, their people and also it makes it easier for them to keep the products safe.

However, if you are still not sure about the benefits, here are those that you can look up to –

•    Accurate location based reporting – With the help of adequate information about the number of shipments available for dispatch and location coordinates for the ones in transition, delivery centers can convey accurate time for the arrival of shipments. This saves the time spent on waiting for the product on the receiving end. It also reduces the cases of failed deliveries as the receiver has been notified in advance of the delivery. It has been observed that a “Pre-delivery” notification is able to curb the “failed deliveries” by 25%.

•    Better coordination – Once the carrier enters the geofence area, it can coordinate on the real-time basis to update the stats about the onward trip automatically. No human coordination is required as the system can itself interpret the remaining distance, speed of the carrier and necessary stop points and duration of the trip and calculate the time of arrival. In the case of changes in schedule due to unexpected stoppages and encounters faced by the carrier, the system can automatically update the new time in the system for reference on real time basis.

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.