Are you looking for the best way to reach your audience of smartphone users? Well, if you do not use geo-marketing in your marketing strategies, then you are missing out on a great opportunity and an important way to enhance communication with your audience and grow your business.

Geographical marketing is one of the most effective strategies at the present time because of its ability to target customers at any time and wherever they are, which makes its use a strong competitive advantage for your business. But what is geographical marketing? What are its most important strategies, and how can they be used?

What is geographical marketing?

Geographical marketing is one of the modern forms of marketing, as it relies on analyzing demographic and economic data for a given area and using the results to plan marketing advertisements and promotions that reach consumers according to their geographical location or the area in which they live. For example; If you sell summer clothing, geo-marketing will ensure that your product promotions only reach audiences in hot regions.

Geographical marketing strategies

Geomarketing is not a marketing tool in itself, but rather one of the marketing strategies that include different marketing methods, all of which depend on geographical location data. They can be classified as follows:

1. Geofencing

This strategy is used specifically for other smartphone and tablet applications, as these applications use the GPS feature to trigger a marketing action (such as a text message, email, social media advertisement, or even a notification from the application) when a smart device that contains the application and has a GPS feature enters the A specific geographic area is called a geofence.

When a girl receives a notification from a mall app on her phone telling her of today's offers while she is walking near the mall, this is a simple example of the idea of ​​geofencing, where a virtual perimeter or boundary is built around a specific geographic area to target those who enter or are in that area.

IOS smartphones also use geofencing in the “if this, then that” command, whose programming is based on the idea of ​​creating one action after another. Users define these procedures according to their needs and what suits them. For example, an order can be given to turn on the house lights when the user is 5 steps away from the door.

What are the benefits of using geofencing?

To take advantage of the geofencing strategy, the app developer must first create virtual boundaries around the geofences to be targeted on Google Maps, provided the app supports GPS. It is within those limits that marketing actions are created to run when a device carrying the application enters the limits. And users need to allow the app to access its location information for the geofence to work.

Geo-fence technology allows easy access to customers at the right place and time, as the geo-fence works on the virtual perimeter system, as soon as anyone enters within the scope of this perimeter, you will be able to reach him and he may become a potential customer. It also works to increase sales by raising the conversion rate.

Let's say you offer 30% off any product in your store, and by creating a geofence around your store's domain you send notifications and ads to the phones of people within that domain. This geofence will attract people to shop and buy products.

And if you want to make your ads and offers to stand out from the dozens of ads that competitors flood users with, geofencing helps you better understand your audience to create personalized ads tailored to each customer's needs by analyzing demographic data and tracking customer preferences.

Disadvantages of geofencing

There is no perfect technology that is free from defects and problems, and this includes geofencing technology, as it requires consent from the user to disclose and share his geographical information with the application. Of course, if you don't enable the feature on the user's device, geofencing won't work.

Because geodata and location data are considered personal information, most users may see geofencing technology as an invasion of their privacy. The technology also consumes a lot of battery capacity, which makes most users disable this feature on their phones. In addition, network efficiency, bandwidth, and device efficiency are limitations for this technology to work smoothly on all devices.

2. Geotargeting

Adware has a feature that allows advertisers to select the geographic regions in which they want their ads to appear. This is a particularly basic tactic for companies that provide home delivery services such as restaurants, pharmacies, and e-commerce sites. Geotargeting is based on targeting potential customers using their IP addresses. Websites use visitors' IP addresses to serve them personalized ads based on their geographic location to suit their needs.

For example, a car dealership may launch an advertising campaign using geo-targeting, to target the audience in the same city as the center or another nearby city. However, there is a limitation in the geotargeting strategy, as the IP address gives geographic location information broadly like the country or city, and not the specific region in which the visitor resides. This makes it difficult to target a specific domain or neighborhood in a city. It may also provide inaccurate results if visitors use proxy servers or IP masking tools.

Showing ads to audiences outside of targeted areas reduces impressions and clicks, thus wasting the business' marketing budget money without getting any return in return. Therefore, geotargeting is a good investment in the marketing budget for many advertisers.

What are the benefits of geotargeting?

Geotargeting allows you to create ads that are relevant to the people who see them. Targeting a specific geographical area enables you to include elements related to that area in your ad, such as language, local culture, national events, and events. Those details touch users personally, which leads to more clicks and conversions.

Geographical targeting is most useful for businesses that sell within a specific geographic area. Concentrating ads in the specific areas where your services are available helps you allocate your marketing budget more effectively. When you pour your marketing efforts into a specific sector at the same time, this leads to better results and obtaining a greater return on investment and lower costs. One of the most prominent examples of this type is the “Google My Business” feature.

Geo-targeting also has the potential to extend your business's reach into new areas with more accurate location-based testing. Testing a new service or product in a smaller area helps fine-tune offers and ads before launching them on a larger scale.

3. Geo-Conquesting

Geograbbing uses geolocation data to locate competitors and target those areas to display competing ads and attract potential customers to competitors. This can be done in two ways:

  • Geo-fence: Instead of creating a virtual perimeter within your store, you create a perimeter around your competitors' storefronts to capture their audience. Small or emerging projects resort to using this feature specifically if there are competitors close to the store who have been around for a long time and have a large customer base.
  • Phone location data: This includes making use of the history of locations where the phone signal was detected, allowing access to users who frequent competing stores. For example, if a person stops at a fast food restaurant to buy a meal, they receive a text message offering another competing restaurant nearby.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of geographical capture?

Geo-hacking based on geo-fences makes it possible to reach people anytime and anywhere they are. For example, users scroll through their phones and search for the best deals on cars while they are actually in a car store and before making a final purchase decision. You can take advantage of this opportunity and attract customers to buy their car from your store.

Using a geograb strategy also increases sales faster. As the targets during this strategy have the intention to buy and while making the purchase, buy from the stores of your competitors. In this case, the ads and messages must be strong and persuasive enough to influence the audience's thinking enough to make them turn to your store instead of the competitor's store.

Despite the benefits of geo-grabbing and its ability to produce significant actual results at the same time that this feature is in operation, some marketers believe that using the go-grabbing strategy is unethical and makes market competition uneven.

4. Wireless Beacon

A wireless beacon is a small transmitter that relies on Bluetooth technology to send signals to nearby smart devices and obtain the geographical location data of those devices, which makes location-based targeting easier and more accurate. Since the beacon is based on Bluetooth technology, it can be used in areas that do not have good phone reception.

The data collected by the beacon usually contains granular details about the customer's location, which helps give customers a better in-store experience by directing them to products they may be interested in.

The wireless beacon consists of 3 parts; a Central processing unit (CPU), radio, and batteries. It repeatedly broadcasts what is known as the identifier (ID), which is a unique number that the smartphone recognizes, and then communication occurs between the phone and the beacon, and the latter begins to perform the actions that it was programmed to launch at the time of communication with the phone.

What are the benefits of using wireless beacon technology?

By linking beacons to your Google Ads account, you will be able to get accurate statistics on user activity and track it even when the user is offline, which helps track your store visits coming from ad referrals.

To clarify the matter, if a user writes “elegant black shoes” in the Google search field, the ad for your store appears at the top of the search results page, so the user clicks on the ad, browses the product, decides to try the shoe, and heads to the store.

Once the user logs in, their phone picks up the beacon's signal, which recognizes the device as the one through which the ad was clicked and records this data to your Google Ads account. By recording store visit data from ad referrals, you will be able to measure the effectiveness of your ads and their impact on users.

If the results are good, you may want to invest more money in this direction, and if they are not good, you will work on finding out the shortcomings of the ads and improving them. Any important information or data can also be sent to people within your guide's scope to attract them to the store.

This data may be messages related to discounts and offers offered by the store. This helps personalize out-of-store marketing and monetize movement around as smartphones become an integral part of our daily lives.

With the precise location offered by these devices, you can optimize your store layout and segmentation to meet your customers' needs. If you find that most customers come to the electronics section and spend more time there than in other sections, you can give that area more space in the store or put it in a prominent place that is easily accessible or near the entrance door.

As this technology helps to improve the customer’s experience by interacting with him with messages and informing him of the offers that he may need during the shopping period, as these advertisements create a kind of trust and familiarity as a result of a sense of interest in him and an understanding of his needs.

Disadvantages of a wireless beacon

The wireless beacon does not work on its own. Although beacon notifications are installed on most devices and smartphones, users need to install an app to capture the beacon's signal. The Beacon can only track the locations and movements of customers when their mobile devices are in their possession and are not turned off and properly configured to receive the Beacon's signals.

Once the phone picks up the beacon signal, the beacon automatically links to the phone and accesses users' information and personal data, which poses a threat to users' privacy and makes them vulnerable to impersonation, as the beacon signals are easy to copy and reuse.

In the end, it is still difficult to determine the extent of the spread of wireless beacon technology, as it is still a relatively young technology. It got a lot of attention before it was released to the general public, but it didn't turn out as expected. With Google's plans to develop this technology, it will be expected that many companies will adopt this technology.

Finally, unlike other marketing strategies, marketing strategies can be guaranteed to succeed if done right. This is because you target a person who needs what you offer by a large percentage, so the success rate is high. Now, have you decided which strategy to use during your upcoming marketing operations? Share your thoughts in the comments section below, and if you have any questions, you are welcome to ask and answer them.