Geofencing campaigns
What Is Geofencing?
Geofencing is the practice of targeting individuals based on where they are or where they have been.
In the era of digital marketing and the abundance of personal data used to build advertising profiles that can sort people into behavioral categories and interest groups, it can be easy to take for granted that the most comprehensive information about a target audience doesn’t necessarily take place online, but in real life.
How Do Geofencing Campaigns Work?
Geofencing works by using audience targeting platforms to construct audiences of individuals that (1) are currently in a location of interest or (2) were in a given location during a specific timeframe. It works by using geographic data collected from mobile devices.
Example: Geofencing a Closing Competitor
Let’s say you work for a community college. A competitor nursing program is closing down within your service area by the end of the year. This will lead to hundreds of students that were in the process of becoming LPNs & RNs without a program.
Geofencing is the only way of reliably reaching these users unless you’re able to obtain a list of the effected students. We can design a geofencing audience of individuals that visit the course location on a regular basis as a way of identifying students. This will give us the ability to target them for the remainder of their course.
But what if the program closes their doors immediately? Instead of designing the campaign to target individuals that are on-site between now and the time the program closes, we can also design audiences based on where users have been in the past, which is to say we can craft an audience targeting individuals that were onsite between January and April (the spring semester) even if we are creating that audience in August.