Billboards No More! Small Business Digital Marketing Services Can Digitize Your Brand Awareness with Geofencing

If you aren’t familiar with geofencing, it’s time to learn about how this digital marketing strategy can help you:

• Precisely target content
• Get the right content out at the right moment
• Put your ad dollars to better use

Whereas local SEO is a geotargeting tactic that allows you to target specific subsets of your target audience, geofencing targets everyone within a chosen location, regardless of characteristics like age or social status. It’s a terrific way to build brand awareness and boost click-through rates and conversions.

Smart WSI Marketing offers small business digital marketing services, including geofencing, that help our clients attract more customers, improve client engagement, and deliver the appropriate products and services to the people who need them most at the moment they need them. Consult with us today to learn more.

How Geofencing Works

Geofencing is a location-based technology that uses GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth to communicate with smartphone, tablet, and computer users in specified geographic areas, including where your competitors do business. The most common forms of geofencing marketing used by small business digital marketing services are PPC and social media ads and app notifications.

You can create geofences around:

• Your business to attract nearby foot traffic
• A competitor’s business
• Companies who refer clients to you
• An event venue

Instead of targeting specific postal codes or neighbourhoods, geofencing uses communications technologies to draw a virtual barrier around a given area. A geofence can be a predefined set of boundaries, such as a circle around an advertiser’s location, a billboard, or an out-of-home ad. You also get to choose when your ads appear, such as on weekends or during certain hours of the day.

Examples of Geofencing

Here are a few ways SMBs can use geofencing to enhance their digital marketing efforts.

1. Retailers can create a geofence surrounding a physical location, so when users pass through it, they receive an alert offering them a deal if they stop in the store.
2. Auto dealers can set up a geofence that targets people as they leave a competing dealership and offer them an incentive like zero percent financing.
3. Event producers can geofence venues with offers for upcoming concerts, art shows, and other events.
4. Law firms can create geofences around jails, hospitals, collision repair shops, and competitor locations.
5. Chiropractors can use geofencing to target gyms or other places where sports injuries are common.

How Geofencing Supports Brand Awareness

Brand awareness in digital marketing refers to the degree of consumer familiarity with a product or service. By implementing various small business digital marketing services, you can distinguish your brand from the competition and use the increased level of awareness to increase sales. Because when consumers are confronted with choices, they’re more likely to buy from a brand they recognize.

Anyone trying to build awareness of their brand knows how challenging it can be. By allowing you to serve targeted ads to audiences more likely to engage with your brand or complete a purchase, geofencing can help:

• Drive new leads
• Gather valuable location data
• Improve ROI
• Best your competitors

Plenty of major players like Starbucks, Tim Hortons, and Walmart successfully use geofencing marketing to maintain or improve their brand’s reputation. You can do the same for your small business, using geofencing to increase customer engagement and entice more people to buy your products and services.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Geofencing Campaigns

There’s no question that geofencing is a great small business digital marketing service for delivering content and advertising more precisely. But a critical part of geofencing’s value is what it provides in terms of data and analytics.

Measuring the results and effectiveness of your geofencing campaigns is key to helping you achieve better results by:

• Building larger audiences
• Improving user engagement
• Providing your marketing team with valuable insights for new campaigns

You can optimize ad campaigns by identifying gaps in your current marketing efforts and using various strategies, tools, and techniques to fill any loopholes. For brand awareness and reach campaigns, impressions, clicks, cost-per-click, and cost-per-lead are good key performance indicators. Conversion campaign metrics should focus on conversion rate, cost-per-sale, and ROI as indicators of success. 

Small Business Digital Marketing Services: Geofencing for the Win

Are you ready to add geofencing to your online marketing efforts? That’s a wise decision, as geofencing is one of the easiest ways to make the most out of your content, campaigns, and promotions. It’s an excellent way to grow your customer base and continuously strengthen your brand identity.

Smart WSI Marketing is an award-winning digital marketing agency that can help you implement geofencing as part of your overall digital marketing strategy in the most cost-effective and successful way. We walk you through the entire process, including:

• Identifying your marketing goals
• Defining your target audiences
• Determining the best geofence parameters
• Tracking results and adjusting and refining campaigns for optimal results

To learn more about our small business digital marketing services and creating and launching ads that speak directly to the customers you want to reach, contact us today.

Lynne Motkoski, Digital Marketing Strategist

Specialty: Digital Marketing Strategies
Education: MA Communications & Technology, BComm [U Alberta]
Author: The Online Marketing Handbook for Busy Entrepreneurs

---

Lynne is known for her strategic approach to marketing communications, technologies, and lead generation. She has a passion for education, keeping up with current marketing trends and practices, and helping clients keep ahead of their competition.