Connect with your target market based on location using geofencing

Say you want to connect with a group of potential customers who attended a game at a specific baseball stadium, who all commute through a specific subway station, or who all attended a particular conference.

A cutting-edge marketing technology, geofencing allows you to create audiences based on these parameters, and then send custom-tailored remarketing messages to those groups.

The technology works like this:

Geofencing relies on GPS technology to track smartphone users and establish audiences. Although the technology is also used to record the movements of companies’ remote workers, and to help parents keep track of itinerant children, its marketing applications are boundless.

1. First, an invisible “fence” is established around your location of choice—a stadium, a conference center, an amusement park, etc.
2. Once you’ve set up your “fence,” all the smartphone users who enter that location are recorded by a marketing technology company and lumped into a remarketing group.
3. Although smartphone users have to have their location services turned on in order to be grouped in this way, upwards of 90% of smartphone users have these services engaged, so your coverage will approach totality.
4. Once you have your geofencing group, you can target it with specifically tailored messages.

Check out the complete infographic from Propellant Media, which shows how not-for-profits can use geofencing to their advantage.

Benefits of geofencing for nonprofits

Anyone tasked with marketing a nonprofit must find the people interested in their cause and connect with them in a meaningful way. Geofencing can help you with both.

• Geofencing is great for connecting with people who visited a conference or event.
  • Want to get in touch with the people who attended your conference but maybe neglected to add their email addresses to the sign-in sheet? By using geofencing, you can create a custom audience of conference attendees, then contact them with follow-up requests or prompts to further action.
• Geofencing can help you activate supporters in a specific region.
  • If you’re staging a rally or event and want to get the word out in the neighborhood where it’s happening, geofencing can help you by creating a marketing audience composed of the people in the region where your event is taking place.
• Geofencing can help you better understand your supporters.
  • Once you’ve collected an audience from geofencing, you can use that data to learn more about your supporters. Data exchanges will allow you to cross-reference the audience you’ve created with other data in order to help you learn your audience’s purchasing habits, demographics, and more.

Geofencing can take much of the guesswork out of location-based marketing, and serves as a great tool for helping nonprofit leaders connect with their supporters.