Running a business in Portland, it can often seem like many customers have no idea there’s anything beyond Portland, especially if they are tourists. For nearby towns like Scarborough, South Portland, or Falmouth, this can make marketing efforts even more challenging. Besides blasting your Facebook pages with paid ads, traditional advertising efforts, and word of mouth traffic, how do you bring a new customer base to your business and reach more customers? This is where the concept of geofencing comes into play.
What Is Geofencing?
Geofencing is the use of GPS (Global Positioning) to specifically define a geographic boundary. This geographic boundary allows businesses to create an invisible “fenced” area that can communicate with targets. By creating this fence, a business can then display ads that then follow users around cross-device. This means they could be targeted on their phone, and they’ll be served the ad. From there, they’ll be retargeted with the same ad on their other devices like their desktop computer or their tablet. These ads can follow around users for a set period of time, and can be set up almost anywhere.
How Can I Use Geofencing To Help My Business?
Now that you have a better understanding of what geofencing is, let’s dive into how you can use geofencing to help pull in more business. For example, because you can create a geographic boundary anywhere, you could use this to target your competitors. If you own a furniture store, you could create a target around one of your competitor’s stores. This would show the potential customer that there are other options around for buying furniture, besides the one place that they are shopping at. Then, the display ad follows them from their devices, so your retargeted ad could show up on their Facebook newsfeed, or on a blog while they are looking at DIY projects. This reminds them that your furniture company is around. It’s also a great way to advertise any deals or promotions that you may have running, which can act as an incentive for them to come check you out.
Another geofencing strategy is putting a geofence around businesses that are complimentary to what you sell. So, if you own a furniture store, maybe you want to put a geofence up around a nearby paint store for those people who are giving their houses a new look. Or maybe you’d like to target a home goods store. The idea is that you’re attracting customers who are already looking for something like what you offer. Geofencing just gives you more visibility in front of people who may not have known about your business, but are looking for services you can help them with.
Where Will My ROI Come From?
The number one question that comes up while discussing marketing is ROI, or return on investment. With geofencing, your ROI will come from tracking, courtesy of UTM tagging in Google Analytics, and individual landing pages. UTM tagging allows us to see which campaigns performed the best, and helps us differentiate between them if you’re running multiple campaigns. Bounce rate, time on site, and engagement all help determine if a campaign has been successful at bringing in leads and conversions. This in turn will help you reach more customers, and get more eyeballs on your content.
Interested in learning more about geofencing, and how it could help you target a customer base that lets you reach more customers outside of Portland? Fill out the form below or give us a call!
