Local Branding and Customer Acquisition with Geofencing
When it comes to growing your business into a strong local brand, there are several tactics and channels to use. Everything from billboards, bus benches, direct mailers, local radio, local television ads and social media.
Building a brand requires a certain amount of "impressions". Consumers need to see or hear your business multiple times to create a top of mind awareness. Enough for them to recognize your business and then connect it with a desired want or need.
Read on for more details on how to acquire customers with geofencing and use it to build a stronger local brand.
Building a Local Brand doesn't need to cost a fortune
So you think building a brand requires your business to be displayed all over town? That it requires thousands of dollars to be in every newspaper, on every radio station and on every television commercial. Think again. Your brand needs to reach the right audience and it needs to reach them multiple times until it influences a certain behavior, such as coming into your business.
One of the most powerful benefits of geofencing advertising is that you can target people that are in a precise location and then continue to serve advertising to that same person for a period of time. By targeting this precise audience, you are only paying to reach them with impressions and then reach them again and again creating a brand lift and ultimately acquiring customers at a fraction of the cost of traditional marketing channels.
How do you use Geofencing to Acquire Customers?
In order to acquire customers using geofencing marketing, you need to work through the following process:
- Identify Target Audience - As you understand who your target audience would be, you then can determine where that audience shops, dines, works or lives. This helps you decide on where you setup geofences to precisely target that audience.
- Calculate Your Budget - Setting a budget helps determine the amount of geofences you should setup. It takes some work to adjust and set the right budget because if your budget is too small, then you are not reaching the audience with a high enough frequency (number of times a person sees your business' ad) to influence the audience. This is referred to as spreading your budget too thin.
- Design Your Ads - Create ads that are compelling, highlight your brand and one simple message. You can use multiple ad sets to delivery multiple messages with one consistent overall brand design. In addition to static or dynamic display ads, video ads can also be shown on digital video or over the top television (OTT).
- Setup Target Geofences - Draw digital fences around the areas to target the audience. These could very from specific office buildings, restaurants, shopping plazas, individual stores, etc. Anytime someone enters these fences with a mobile device, they could be a possible target to serve your business, building your local brand's influence.
- Setup Conversion Zones - Typically these would be your place of business. When your ads serve to people that enter a target geofence and later enter the conversion zone, they are reported as a "converted" or acquired customer.
Geofencing works best when run over a longer period of time so plan campaigns out for at least 3 months. Use this along with other marketing strategies to acquire customers. You can then focus on lifting your brand and increasing the frequency of your customers.
How can you make Geofencing more effective in building a Local Brand?
The best way to make geofencing more effective is to incorporate it with other channels of marketing such as social media advertising and local search.
Running multi-channel marketing strategies can be challenging to setup but are best optimized when you have the proper reporting of the marketing data. You can optimize by turning off geofences that do not convert as high and increase budgets towards geofence targets that perform higher. This then shifts remarketing of channels such as social media towards targeting a more likely to convert audience.
Maximizing the data provided from geofence targeting empowers you to grow your local brand with the highest ROI as possible.
Use the mySuite business marketing platform to run powerful geofencing campaigns to build your local brand.
