As a marketing professional or business owner, you’ve likely heard of the advertising technique known as addressable geofencing marketing. But you may be wondering, “What really is addressable geofencing, and how can I incorporate it into my outreach strategy?”
Addressable geofencing is a highly precise advertising tactic that targets specific households and businesses with personalized digital marketing campaigns across multiple channels. A type of geofencing marketing, addressable geofencing uses a virtual geofence to reach all connected devices within a property address.
Businesses, nonprofits, and other organizations are increasingly taking a hyper-targeted approach to advertising. Before, these organizations might have tried to cast as wide a net as possible, using traditional mass media such as television, radio, and print advertisements to attempt to reach a far-flung audience.
Now, advanced marketing strategies and tools, including geofencing marketing, allow organizations to take a highly tailored marketing approach and deliver their digital content straight into the hands of those most likely to engage with it.
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about addressable geofencing, how it works, and how you can integrate it into your marketing strategy to best achieve your goals. We’ll explore:
- What Is Geofencing Marketing?
- Where Can You Use Geofencing Marketing?
- Benefits of Using Addressable Geofencing Marketing
- How to Use Addressable Geofencing: 4 Steps
- Tips for Effective Addressable Geofencing Marketing
- AccuData Integrated Marketing’s Geofencing Products
Geofencing can be a great way to supplement your marketing strategy to create a well-rounded approach that builds strong relationships with your target audience and boosts conversions. But how do you know if it’s the right move for your organization? Read on to learn more about geofencing marketing and where addressability fits in!
What Is Geofencing Marketing?
Geofencing marketing is a location-based advertising technique that allows marketers to connect with target audience members digitally.
A geofence is a virtual boundary surrounding a specific geographic location. Whenever a computer, smartphone, tablet, or laptop is identified within the geofence, the device is identified and tagged for advertising. Geofencing marketing involves sending digital advertisements to all connected devices within that boundary.
In addition to addressable geofencing, geofencing marketing techniques include mobile geofencing and venue replay, allowing you to incorporate other targeted location and demographic data into your marketing effort. (More on these techniques below!)
Since addressable geofencing tends to be a more advanced form of digital marketing, it’s recommended that you partner with a digital marketing firm to make the most of this method. These professionals have the expertise and background knowledge needed to carry out a geofencing strategy effectively.
Where Can You Use Geofencing Marketing?
Geofencing marketing can open your organization up to brand-new audiences and prospective customers that you may have struggled to reach in the past.
Depending on the type of geofencing you use, you have the opportunity to reach audiences at all of the following locations and events:
- Storefronts
- Homes
- Sporting events
- Conferences
- Concerts
- Trade shows
- Hotels
- Competing locations
- Colleges
Many of these events, including trade shows, concerts, sporting events, and conferences, see thousands of participants each, representing a major boost in your advertising reach!
Benefits of Using Addressable Geofencing Marketing
Addressable geofencing marketing technology is constantly evolving to help marketers reach new audiences and connect with their current customers on a deeper level. Addressable geofencing makes it easy to:
- Improve the precision of your local marketing efforts. Addressable geofencing, alongside services such as Mobile GeoFence or Venue Replay, can help you access local audience members you may want to reach. For example, if you’re interested in expanding your business to a new location, you can reach your best prospects in that new area to start promoting your brand and raising awareness of your expansion.
- Reach your audience members across multiple touchpoints to build brand awareness and loyalty. In the nonprofit marketing world, it can take up to 18-20 different touchpoints to reach a new donor for the first time. In the for-profit sector, it takes an average of eight touches before prospective customers feel inclined to make a purchase. No matter the industry, addressable geofencing can help increase the number of touchpoints between your organization and its prospective audience members by supplementing your direct mail marketing with digital outreach across recipients’ mobile devices, tablets, and laptops.
- Connect with prospective audience members or customers using highly relevant and timely ads. Let’s say your business sells customized business card holders. Your local chamber of commerce is hosting a conference for community business leaders to mingle, share updates, and make connections. Who uses a business card holder more than someone who attends business conferences? By using addressable geofencing, you can use digital ads to promote your business card holders to conference attendees, serving a highly relevant ad they’re more likely to actually click.
- Access detailed analytics. Addressable geofencing gives your organization access to a wealth of audience insights. For example, with AccuData’s Addressable GeoFence, you can gather individual data on audience members, such as identifying matched households, and track their interactions with your digital ads. Use this information to determine the effectiveness of your advertising and adjust your future ad campaigns.
As you know, there are very few certainties in the world of marketing. Your ad campaigns may be partially (or entirely) based on educated guesses or hunches about what your audience prefers and is likely to engage with. With addressable geofencing, you can bring a stronger sense of certainty into your campaign planning by advertising to audience members you know are more receptive to your content.
How to Use Addressable Geofencing: 4 Steps
After reviewing all the benefits, you may be convinced that addressable geofencing is the right move for your strategy. At the same time, you likely want to know what you’re getting into to ensure that your investment in this technique will be worth it. Let’s look at the four core steps for building an addressable geofencing campaign:
Step 1: Build a List of Physical Addresses to Target
Already have a Direct Mail list of targeted customers? This is a great complement to a Direct Mail campaign as it is proven to expand awareness and recall. If not, you can build a list using consumer demographic and psychographic data (or firmographic data for businesses) or CRM data for targeting current customers or building lookalike audiences.
Step 2: Design Your Ad Content
If your campaign addresses multiple target audiences, you’ll want to develop ads customized to each. Because of their digital format, ads can include video and animation in addition to text.
Not sure where to start? Many digital advertising providers, including AccuData, offer copywriting and creative design services to support this process.
Step 3: Serve Ads to Targeted Devices
Once your list is built (or lists for multiple audiences) and your ads are ready to go, your digital advertising partner with addressable geofencing capabilities will begin delivering your ads to the connected devices within your geofence. Ads will automatically appear to consumers as they browse the internet and view their favorite news and media sites.
Step 4: Track and Manage Your Geofencing Campaign
At the end of your campaign, you’ll receive a performance report that includes:
- The total number of impressions served
- The total number of clicks
- The click-through rate
- The estimated number of people who saw your ad (unique views)
- Time and day trends
- A sample of the websites on which your ad may have appeared
- The top performing creative ad
- Behavioral insights
- Additional conversion tracking/attribution reporting, if enabled
By keeping track of these key metrics, you can understand the strengths and weaknesses of your approach and make improvements going forward.
Tips for Effective Addressable Geofencing Marketing
Alongside the steps above, using data best practices will help you design the most effective addressable geofencing campaign. Use the following tips in your geofencing strategy:
Understand your target audience.
Before you launch your strategy, it’s important to understand exactly who you’re trying to target with your campaign. If you don’t know your target audience, you won’t be able to determine how or where to reach them with your geofencing techniques.
Whether you’re looking to connect with a Direct Mail audience at their homes or businesses; or sports fans, nonprofit volunteers, conference-goers, shopaholics, or customers at a competing business, be sure to define your target audience. Then, you can identify the messaging that will be the most effective (as well as any locations where you’re most likely to connect with these individuals with mobile geofencing techniques).
Optimize your ad content.
Ensure that the ads you send to your audience are well-designed and compelling by:
- Choosing imagery that represents your business or mission and deploying your brand elements, such as your logo and color palette.
- Running a spelling and grammar check to make sure you’ve dotted the I’s and crossed the T’s.
- Adding interactive or video ads to your geofencing campaigns to further engage recipients.
After you’ve done all the work to target prospects using addressable geofencing, you don’t want to lose them simply because of poor ad copy.
Use a compelling call to action (CTA) to encourage engagement.
Ultimately, you want your geofencing campaign to do more than simply get ads in front of your audience members. You also want those individuals to engage with your organization and take the next step in your sales funnel—whether it’s visiting your website, viewing your product pages, signing up for a free demo, or purchasing your services.
Therefore, your digital ads should include compelling CTAs that encourage audience members to take a clear next step.
Forget the generic “Click Here” button. Depending on your organization’s goals, you might say “Sign Up for a Free Account Now,” “Book Your Free Demo,” or “Access Your Free Sample.” As you can see, these examples incorporate another top insight—people love free stuff! Audience members will be much more willing to click your ad if they know they won’t immediately be thrown into a payment situation.
If you get stuck, just think about what would make you click on a digital display ad. When you decide to click on an ad, it’s probably because it has a special factor that drew you in. Whether it’s an attractive product that you thought would enhance your daily life or a compelling free offer, think about the particular calls to action that make certain digital ads irresistible.
Track engagement data to assess progress.
How many people are clicking on your digital ads? How many individuals visit your business or use your online store because they saw your ad campaign and were intrigued? Track engagement data to assess the effectiveness of your addressable geofencing efforts.
You can also use A/B testing to determine the effectiveness of different geofencing choices. For example, you can create two slightly different versions of the same ad and send them to different members within your overall target audience to assess which version is most effective. Or, you can adjust your geofencing parameters to market to different segments of your audience.
Keep your data organized.
As you gather information on your audience members and ad campaigns, keep your insights organized and easily accessible. You may be storing customer data in your internal database or keeping records of your ad engagement metrics. Either way, it’s important to incorporate data hygiene best practices to keep this information organized. We recommend:
- Auditing your database to identify errors or mistakes, such as incorrect customer contact information.
- Standardizing your data entry procedures, including numerical entries and street addresses.
- Designating one staff member to be your data czar and handle all data entry issues.
Following these strategies ensures that you can use your database as a reference when planning future campaigns. You can assess the successes and failures of previous initiatives and determine the best path forward accordingly.
Work with a geofencing marketing specialist.
Addressable geofencing requires a certain level of finesse and experience to pull off successfully. If you don’t have a tech wizard on your team, it’s recommended that you work with a geofencing specialist to get the most out of your campaign.
Geofencing marketing experts (like AccuData Integrated Marketing!) offer the following services:
- Helping to identify your target markets and audiences
- Launching and managing your addressable geofencing or geoframing campaign
- Working as an extension of your team to see your campaign through to the end
- Tracking data and reporting on campaign insights
For example, when a well-known Arizona auto dealership was looking for ways to improve client retention and increase sales, they used AccuData’s Addressable GeoFence technology to capitalize on past customer relationships. As a result, they obtained a 71.58% increase in conversions over previous marketing tactics and over $230,000 in sales.
For a customized geofencing marketing plan, reach out to us at AccuData today.
AccuData Integrated Marketing’s Geofencing Products
As we mentioned above, addressable geofencing is just one aspect of the larger geofencing marketing landscape, and every digital marketing company has its own unique process and services.
As an example, let’s dive into how AccuData Integrated Marketing helps organizations carry out their geofencing marketing activities. AccuData offers three primary geofencing and geoframing services: Addressable GeoFence, Mobile GeoFence/GeoFollow, and Venue Replay. Let’s take a look at each:
Addressable GeoFence
Addressable GeoFence is AccuData’s service for reaching households or businesses in your target market.
This product uses innovative, cookie-free technology to match postal addresses with verified GPS and property plat line data to target your desired audience’s specific homes and businesses.
AccuData receives a 90% or greater match rate to postal files, meaning you can conduct highly precise online targeting. You can use this service to target:
- Existing loyalty or acquisition postal lists of audience members identified by your team
- Prospective audience members gathered by the AccuData team
- Customized audience lists based on demographic or geographic details
This is an effective way to transform your direct mail marketing audience into a digital audience and reach prospects across multiple platforms.
Mobile GeoFence/GeoFollow
Mobile GeoFence/GeoFollow is ideal for marketers looking to target all of the individuals within a certain virtual boundary. These services identify devices within a boundary, allowing you to serve each individual highly relevant display ads on their smartphones. However, there are a few key differences between these two mobile-based targeting techniques.
Mobile GeoFence
Mobile GeoFence allows you to reach certain audience members within a boundary in real-time. When an individual accesses the internet or starts an app session within the boundary, GPS data is used to identify their device and serve them relevant ads.
This technique is effective for reaching audience members at major events, such as conferences, concerts, trade shows, hotels, sporting events, or a competitor’s location. This method is used only when audience members are present at your specified location.
Mobile GeoFollow
You can continue connecting with target audience members after they’ve left the location using the Mobile GeoFollow service. GeoFollow uses beacon technology to continue enabling consumers’ phones to receive your ads for up to 30 days after they depart from your specified location.
This technology allows you to continue marketing to your target audience even after they’ve left a certain location, keeping your organization front of mind.
Venue Replay
With Venue Replay, you can reach target audience members who have visited a specific location within a certain time frame, up to six months in the past.
Venue Replay leverages geoframing technology, which is slightly different from geofencing.
Geoframing uses coordinate data to identify the exact location of a certain event, creating a highly defined boundary. When people visit that location and use their devices, their device IDs are inventoried.
Then, AccuData takes your desired location and date range to identify your target audience. For instance, if you wanted to market to individuals who visited a competing business location in the past three months, AccuData could identify anyone who met these specifications alongside their home IP address and other connected devices.
With this data in hand, your organization can start serving ads to not only the specified individuals, but also to the other connected devices in their home network.
You can use Venue Replay to reach specific audiences like:
- Sports fans who attended a game at your local arena
- Music-lovers who attended a major concert or festival
- Conference-goers who attended relevant events
- Shoppers who visited a competitor’s store
As you can see, there are a plethora of strategies for conducting geofencing marketing that range from targeting individuals at a specific place or event to reaching out to audience members months after they visit a specific location.
To learn more about each of our offerings and find the right solution for your organization, contact us at AccuData today.
Wrapping Up
If your digital marketing efforts have hit a rut and you’re seeing less and less audience engagement, addressable geofencing alongside other geofencing and geoframing techniques may be the strategy you need to revamp your campaigns.
You can reach your target audience directly, meeting them exactly where they are and serving them relevant information that resonates with their needs. Now, all that’s left to do is get started!
If you’re looking for more information on digital marketing techniques, explore these additional resources:
- Data Enhancement: What Is It (And Why Is It Important?). Is your audience database missing key information? Find out how data enhancement services can fill in the gaps.
- Marketing Analytics: A Guide for Marketing Professionals. Marketing analytics leverages the information you’ve learned about your audience to make informed marketing decisions. Learn more about this practice with this comprehensive guide.
- Digital Marketing: The Complete Guide for Your Team. A strong digital marketing strategy is necessary to stay ahead of the competition. Here’s everything you need to know to make your strategy successful.
