In the fast-evolving world of digital marketing, understanding and utilizing the right tools and tactics can make a significant impact on your success. Two location-based marketing tactics, Geofencing and Geoframing, offer different methods to reach potential customers based on where they visit in the real world. Below we explore the differences between these two strategies, and why Geoframing offers significantly more benefit and value for your marketing investment.
What is Geofencing?
Geofencing is a well known location-based marketing strategy that involves setting up a virtual boundary, or “fence,” around a specific geographic area and attempting to deliver ads to devices within that area in real-time.
Common Uses of Geofencing:
- Real-Time Promotion: Send special offers, discounts, or coupons to those in proximity to your business
- Competitor Conquesting: Deliver ads to potential customers near or within a competitor’s location
- Event Marketing: Target attendees of concerts, sports games, trade shows and festivals with information or promotional messaging
Key Disadvantages of Geofencing:
- Reduced Scale: Very few impressions are typically available, especially when the geofence covers a small area
- Serving the Wrong Location: Ads can be served to customers outside the geofence due to inaccurate location data in ad requests
- Flawed Model: Advertising to someone just because of where they happen to be at a given moment is not effective unless you layer in additional understanding of their intent and behavior
What is Geoframing?
Geoframing, on the other hand, is a more refined and scalable approach that involves creating a precise polygon around a specific location to gather historical visitor data to better understand consumer intent and behavior. Unlike Geofencing, which operates in real-time, Geoframing analyzes data over a custom time frame in the past and provides measurable and accurate behavioral data. OnSpot’s Geoframing technology utilizes this historical data to create highly targeted audience segments that can be used for insights and analysis, activation in multichannel campaigns, and in foot traffic attribution reporting.
Key Advantages of Geoframing:
- Retargeting: Reach potential customers who have previously visited a location.
- Market Research: Analyze consumer behaviors and demographic insights to refine your marketing strategy.
- Behavioral Analytics: Develop detailed buyer personas based on the locations frequented by the observed mobile devices.
- Audience Extension: Use your base audience of Geoframe visitors and increase your reach to include members of their household, behavioral & demographic lookalikes, or real-world friends, family, and coworkers that are likely to fit the persona of your original Geoframe visitors.
- Campaign Measurement: Measure visitors at selected locations and accurately report how many of those visitors came directly from your advertising efforts.
Example Use Cases: Geoframing and Geofencing Combined
These two tactics can be utilized together in a marketing campaign to ensure that the target audience is accurately identified through Geoframing, while providing the end client with the real-time capabilities of Geofencing that they may require. Below are a few use cases to consider:
- Event Marketing: Use Geoframing to create an audience of potential concert goers, sports fans, or conference attendees by analyzing their past behaviors and demographic characteristics. Serve advertising to drive them to purchase tickets or register to attend. During an event, utilize real-time Geofencing to promote special offers and discounts.
- Competitor Conquesting: Use Geoframing to create frequency-based audiences of visitors to competitor locations to identify loyal customers. Advertise to this loyal customer segment across multiple channels to persuade them to visit your business instead, including when they are actively visiting a competitor location through real-time Geofencing.
- Out-Of-Home Advertising: Use Geoframing to capture foot traffic that passes by your OOH installation and create an audience of exposed visitors. While the OOH advertising campaign is running, retarget the exposed foot traffic in real-time by utilizing a Geofence in the specified boundary to encourage visitation to the destination business.
Location-based marketing tactics create opportunities to reach customers in new ways through multiple channels. The detailed behavioral analytics that Geoframing provides gives campaign managers actionable insights into the right segmentation opportunities for their use case. Additionally, these audiences can be efficiently activated to reach the right people, with the right message, on the right channel, at the right time. Real-time Geofencing can be applied as a secondary campaign tactic to leverage the proximity of users in a specific location and reach them with timely messaging. The OnSpot Data Platform and Integrated DSP allow for both tactics to be executed together with detailed attribution measurement to ensure you are getting the most out of your advertising spend.
To learn more about how OnSpot Data can transform your marketing efforts and drive better results, contact our team of experts today.
