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Tech-savvy marketers are increasingly turning to location-based marketing strategies. By these means, they are hoping to increase their advertising reach. In other words, they use smartphone users’ mobile location services to suggest offers that may be of interest to them. This is called geofencing marketing. This is a method of alerting prospective customers about offers for goods and services within close geographical proximity.

Understanding the pros and cons of using geofencing as a marketing tool is vital for business owners and their digital marketers. This is especially true for businesses that provide services and products in offline locations.

Why
Use Geofencing?

What sets geofencing apart from marketing strategies such as search engine optimization and conversion rate optimization is that it doesn’t require potential customers to actively search for businesses in nearby locations. Instead, it reacts when a smartphone user enters a company’s listed geographic area. Basically, geofencing focuses on mobile users and their geographic information in lieu of website content. This makes geofence marketing ideal for local businesses who rely on physical sales.

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Businesses benefit from geofencing because it enables them to narrow in on potential clients for their physical stores. However, geofencing is also a form of advertising that can be useful to consumers, too.

How Geofence Marketing Helps Consumers

Geofencing improves users’ lives and online experiences by providing useful information to help them organize their daily lives.

Every day, we all face the overwhelming information overload that is the Internet. Prioritizing advertising for local business is one aspect of community-driven social media policies. For instance, consider policies such as those utilized in popular platforms like Facebook.

Consumers also benefit from receiving recommendations for businesses in the areas that are nearby to addresses they have recently visited. This feature distinguishes geofencing from telemarketer calls and spam texts. What’s more, research shows that personalized messages from websites improves those websites’ click rates.

The
Mobile-First Approach

Increasing numbers of people access the Internet via their mobile phones. And geofencing provides marketers with a means of capitalizing on all these mobile users.

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That’s because geofencing enhances technologies that have been in common use for a while. These include GPS, RFID, WiFi, and cellular data. Simply put, when a mobile user enters a particular geographical area, a number of actions can occur. For example, the user can receive a push notification or some targeted ads. Additionally, some technologies could be disabled.

This works by setting a boundary around the desired target area using Google Maps, for example. Then the marketer instructs the app they’re working with to respond whenever a user enters or exits that area. For instance, the response could be sending a message, posting a targeted ad on social media, or taking some other pre-programmed action.

Developers create thousands of new apps every day. Moreover, a good many apps have managed to obtain “daily use” status. However, most apps fade into the shadows as users become preoccupied with the latest new tech updates.

But geofencing can help keep app users engaged. They do this by providing insights into users’ behavior and their environments. This information is also valuable for online-to-offline attribution, which refers to how online marketing strategies yield offline sales. That’s because users who browse items online can receive alerts about offers in their area. In this way, marketers can stay on top of what their clients’ target audiences need and desire.

Marketers have also learned that people check instant messages within less than five minutes. This fact makes geofencing more effective than sending emails and social posts in many instances.

Does
Geofencing Compromise Privacy?

Naturally, many users have some concern about any technology that monitors their activity and physical location for entertainment or advertising purposes. With geofencing, however, the customer is relatively empowered in many ways.

To begin with, geofencing always requires upfront permission from users. This transparency ensures users that sharing their location will improve their experience. It also assures them that their information will be protected, as accessible privacy policies explain.

The Dark Side of Geofence Marketing

However, marketers in some industries use geofence marketing to exploit consumers. For example, law firms sometimes use geofencing to target emergency room patients. As a new development in the rapidly progressing digital world, the ethical implications of geofence marketing should be further explored.

Where
Are Good Locations for Geofencing?

Before contemplating this question, you’d need to consider the nature of the business you are marketing and the types of customers you need to attract. If you are a restaurant owner situated in a shopping mall, for example, it would make sense to tag the shopping center.

Try to focus on areas where large groups of people are likely to be seeking the service you offer. For example, if you are marketing for a nightclub and know that your target crowd usually has cocktails and dinner in a trendy neighborhood nearby, you could use that area as a geofence.

Exploiting Competitors’ Special Offers

It could also be useful to find out about specials and discounts a competing business is offering nearby. In this case, a marketer could target customers who were in the same mall to visit a different store and didn’t realize there was a better option.

Putting
Local Businesses Ahead

If your business sells physical products or provides a service in a designated geographic area, no one needs to tell you that you need to translate your online reach into real-life customers. Geofencing saves you money on your marketing strategy by focusing on a group of potential customers who are already likely to visit your store. It also helps establish brand loyalty for a store that users interact with in their everyday offline lives.

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Geofence marketing is a great way of reaching customers in close proximity to a business’s physical location. It helps improve user experience by providing information about what services are available to them in their physical locations.

When using geofencing marketing strategies, consider the kind of industry you are advertising. Also, take into account the people you are targeting based on their locations. A good understanding of geofence marketing can have a great effect on your business’s brand and profits.

A presentation should never be one-sided. Instead, a good presentation is a conversation between you and your audience.

It can be lonely (and nerve-wracking) to be at a podium or the head of a board table. That’s why it’s always helpful to get some other voices involved in your presentation. A presentation that encourages interaction is engaging, immersive, and memorable.

Besides, when you’re speaking for an extended period, you’re bound to get sick of your voice at some point. So why not give yourself a break from talking by encouraging audience members to take part in your presentation? If you are looking to integrate interactive elements into future demonstrations, you can get tips to help improve your presentations from a PowerPoint design agency.

According to Forbes, the average person spends 37 percent of their time at work in presentations or meetings. Therefore, you might as well make your presentation interesting. What better way to keep people awake than to make them part of the conversation?

Work with a PowerPoint presentation design company that can help you build a presentation that is informative and engaging. There are many possible interactive elements you can integrate into your demonstration. It’s all about finding the right one for your presentation.

Ask Your Audience Questions

Ask your audience to participate in your presentation. For example, prompt your audience to guess a fact. Or ask them to share an anecdote or express an opinion on your concept or idea. The options are endless. Asking a question will help you read the room and can also help you make a point.

Give Them Answers

Give your audience a chance to ask questions. Especially if you are pitching or explaining a complex idea, prompt your audience members to ask any questions they might have. If you are worried that no one will answer, all you have to do is prepare for the scenario.

For instance, if no one wants to put their hand up or voice their question, you can always lead with, “A common question people usually have is…” or, “You might wonder about…” This can start providing answers to some anticipated general questions. Also, it can encourage people to follow up these posed questions with questions of their own.

Take a Poll

You can always use poll results to make a point in your presentation. For example, poll audience members before your presentation or even during your presentation using clickers.

Pose a question or various options and allow audience members to weigh in. You can do this to make a point with the results. Or you can just use this to gauge your audience’s general opinions.

If you are really looking to make an impact, use a poll to get a consensus on your audience’s opinion on a matter. Then, provide some extra information or a fact that could change their minds completely. Take that poll again and reveal the disparity in the results. This is engaging and forces your audience to think about what you are talking about.

Get Social

If you are a keynote speaker, it’s always a good idea to further the scope of your speech. To this end, encourage audience members to take pictures and video to share across social media.

Additionally, choose a hashtag. Then when you go home you’ll see all the tweets or Instagram posts about your presentation. Hashtags will centralize any post on your speech. They will also bring it to the attention of people who missed it. This will also allow anyone who missed your speech to pinpoint the main takeaways from your presentation.

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Getting social also makes it possible
for you to reach out after your presentation to share any additional thoughts
and thank your audience for interacting.

Include Your Audience and Enjoy More Powerful Presentations

There are countless ways to get interactive with your presentation. It’s all about finding the right presentation design company to help you integrate these elements.

When it comes to digital marketing strategies and the best way of getting attention for your online business, there are two central methods: SEO, or search engine optimization, and PPC, or pay per click advertising. They represent different approaches, and each has distinct benefits and difficulties.

By getting a clear understanding of each, you can make a more informed decision about the best way forward for your business. Also, you’ll understand whether you need to investigate SEO literature and trends, or PPC campaigns and services.

PPC – Pay Per Click

Pay per click marketing is an upfront cost style of marketing. Using an online payment platform, you approach a search engine (most probably Google) to arrange the placement of digital advertisements. Through a bidding system, you arrange to have advertisements that link to your website’s pages placed as high as possible on the results page of a search for a particular set of keywords. The money for your bid is only collected if the person viewing your ad actually clicks through to your link.

Pros of PPC

The biggest advantages of PPC are that it is simple, testable, predictable, and scalable. PPC does not involve lots of elaborate website coding, keyword researching, traffic analysis, or extensive deals with other blogs and content creators.

With PPC, at its most basic level, you simply put in your bid. Then you specify your keywords and you are good to go. This simplicity also makes it eminently testable. You can turn a PPC campaign on and off with ease. This allows you to see clearly the difference made with your campaigns.

PPC is also very predictable. That’s because you openly specify the pages that your ads link to. In other words, with a PPC ad, you invite potential customers to link directly to your purchase pages for particular products or services. Also, by using simple adjustments to the range of keywords or the size of your bid, you can easily scale a PPC campaign.

Cons of PPC

The two biggest disadvantages of PPC are cost and behavior. PPC can be extremely expensive. Moreover, with each and every person that clicks through, it becomes exponentially more costly.

This means you are vulnerable to bounces, people who visit your page but do not buy. Therefore, PPC creates the strange situation where people not buying your product can actively cost you money. PPC ads are also more likely to be the target of ad blocking software. And they’re defenseless against people’s instinctive advertisement avoidance.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is a more organic approach to marketing. Rather than paying the search engine directly, you engineer the contents of your website so that it contains certain keywords. This in turn draws the attention of search engines.

Other SEO processes involve reaching out to other websites and blogs and either requesting or purchasing posts that will link back to your page. This is called “backlinking.” The more backlinks there are to your page, the better regarded your website will be by the search engines.

This is just the barest bones of what SEO involves, but the broad principles are here. As the name suggests, it is about optimizing the content of your website for the benefit of the search engine.

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Pros of SEO

The biggest advantages of SEO are that it is relatively inexpensive, it has exceptional longevity, and it takes advantage of intrinsic Internet behavior. Although aspects of SEO can be paid for, most of it is functionally free. Instead, it involves strategies like regular blog posting, collaborative linking, and generally making good content.

While this can be time-intensive, the results it produces once it gets going can last for a long time. Moreover, these results do not require the constant stream of investment that PPC needs. Furthermore, because it is linked to using natural results of a search engine, rather than paid advertising, it is immune to ad blocking software. In fact, many Internet users offer more trust to pages they find in the upper to mid-tier of their search results.

Cons of SEO

SEO may be free, but as has been mentioned it is time-intensive. PPC simply involves filling in a form and arranging payment. For SEO it can take weeks, or even months, before you find yourself on the first page of a search engine’s results page.

SEO is also highly unpredictable. You can do your best to target your content toward particular keywords. However, you have no way of knowing which ones will lead online browsers to your page. Nor can you predict which of your pages they will come across first. If you are looking to make particular product pages successful during specific seasons, SEO is an unwieldy tool to accomplish this goal.

Conclusion

SEO and PPC are different beasts. Depending on your business model, the industry you work in, and many other factors, their advantages and disadvantages will interact with you in different ways. There is no right or wrong approach, only the approach that fits you and your business best.