What is Geo-Fencing?

So, what is geo-fencing and why do you hear so much about it these days in terms of marketing?

Wikipedia describes it this way: “A geo-fence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area. A geo-fence could be dynamically generated—as in a radius around a point location, or a geo-fence can be a predefined set of boundaries.”

How to Get Super Granular with Geo-Fencing

Geo-fencing is primarily applied in digital marketing. Unlike some other forms of advertising, digital advertising allows you to serve your ads to very granular targeted audience sets. With digital advertising, not only can we serve ads to individuals who consist of certain demographic and behavioral characteristics, we can focus in on a very tight geographic location and serve ads only to those people within a specific area. Even more, we can make that “geo-fence” as tight as one stadium, event location, or neighborhood street. With some digital products, we can even serve ads to a specific household. Now that is granular!

When you buy TV or radio ads, your ads are served to the demographic audience & geographic locations in which that station reaches. But, you can’t distinguish the audiences inside that group the way you can with digital. In other words, let’s say you want to reach consumers within a 10 mile radius of your place of business. With a TV or radio ad, there is no way to accomplish that because your ad is broadcast to everyone their station reaches. You may think “Wow, that’s great – why wouldn’t I want to reach as many people as possible?” The reason is because you’re paying to reach an audience who will be unlikely to become a customer based on where they are located. A radio station may reach an audience up to 100 miles away from its location. You are paying to reach that customer even though it’s very unlikely that they would come into your place of business.

You’ve Got to Understand the Customer

In some cases, it may make a lot of sense to have a very broad audience reach. So, depending upon the goal of your advertising, TV and radio may be a very important part of your overall media mix. However, if you know that the majority of your customers will come from a specific area or a certain mile radius of your business, then a geo-fenced digital ad campaign can be highly effective, and highly efficient in reaching your advertising goals.

CMOco proudly offers 15+ highly sophisticated digital marketing products. We’d be glad to tell you more!