Location-based targeting has long been at the forefront of digital innovation, but as franchise marketing steps away from the one-size-fits-all approach, it has grown and evolved as a powerful strategy to create a true one-on-one audience experience.
“Don’t push people to where you want to be; meet them where they are.”
–Meghan Keaney Anderson, VP Marketing, Hubspot
As a franchise brand or location owner, it is in your best interest to reach the right audience at the right time and in the right location rather than advertising to everyone everywhere; it’s a smarter use of valuable marketing dollars.
Programmatic geofencing has revolutionized location-based marketing, as it gives franchises the opportunity to serve digital ads to mobile users within specific locations that data flags as relevant to their business. Through this tactic, prospects meeting your target demographic criteria who physically walk into geofenced areas or event spaces with a GPS enabled device may be shown your ads for up to 30 days. During this period, these display ads appear on unique websites and at different times depending on each prospect’s personal browsing and conversion behaviors.
These 5 uses of geofence ads are making programmatic geofencing increasingly worthwhile within the franchise marketing space:
- Directly target your competitors’ customers and prospects.
Whether you’re a fitness franchise or beauty business in the health and wellness space or currently trying to expand your youth-focused education franchise, franchise businesses are popping up everywhere, offering consumers more options—and providing franchise brands with tougher competition—than ever before.
Take 10 seconds to note your top 3 to 5 competing brands or local businesses. Now imagine being able to reach and influence every customer or member who walks into those competing locations. Geofencing lets you do this, and you can even track how many of your competitors’ customers visited your business after seeing your competing ad.
If you’re ready to run a competitor-focused geofencing campaign, be sure to leverage an enticing offer that rivals what your competitors are offering to their customers, members, and prospects, creating a sense of urgency to visit your brand’s business location instead.
- Meet your prospects at their favorite restaurants, stores, concerts, and sporting events.
Popular locations and events serve as prime opportunities to capture possible consumers that will be interested in your product or service.
Has your marketing data shown that most of your customers or members shop at Whole Foods? Use geofencing to target similar qualified prospects who physically walk into a local Whole Foods grocery store.
Does part of your franchise presales campaign include sponsoring a tabling event at a community 5K race? A geofencing campaign can ensure that anyone who is present at the event continues seeing your ads well afterward, until they take action.
Looking to bolster your franchise recruitment efforts and attract more qualified franchise prospects? Geofencing enables physically targeting attendees of franchise conventions like the IFA conference and MUFC as well as trade shows specific to your industry.
- Increase the lifetime value of current customers and prospects.
Geofencing doesn’t just have to target other business and event areas; you also have the option of fencing your own franchise locations in order to show ads to current customers and prospects who physically entered and purchased or browsed your products or services. This allows you to stay top of mind, build loyalty by thanking them and promoting a rewards program, and encourage repeat visits through a trackable limited-time discount code they can use next time.
Win big from an addressable win-back campaign.
From customers who haven’t visited or purchased in a long time to ex-members who cancelled their membership, addressable geofencing allows you to digitally show ads across all their household or business devices by targeting their specific addresses. Be sure to use a compelling offer and message that motivates them to give your business another chance—but sometimes your previous customers just need a reminder that they used to love your product or service.
- Measure online-to-offline conversions.
In traditional digital marketing, we can use lead forms and landing pages to get some sense of direct ad campaign results—but many prospective customers could see an ad on Facebook, skip filling out a lead form, independently scope out your social media and Yelp reviews, then call or show up at your location if and when they decide to buy. Even though the ad created that customer lead, it’s not tracked as a lead, thus losing some visibility into the overall campaign performance.
Geofencing allows greater lead tracking, even when a prospect takes other actions between seeing your ad and purchasing. Setting your physical location as the “Conversion Zone” enables identifying how many of the individuals who saw your geofencing ad eventually enter your location, thus providing franchisees with a better sense of marketing ROI.
How will your franchise brand benefit?
Hyperlocal geofencing has proven tremendous value as it bridges the physical and digital divide to create unique opportunities for consumers by providing them with relevant ads based on their location, interest and behaviors. In today’s mobile-driven world, there’s no doubt that geofencing will only become more prevalent, with early adapters standing to gain the most from this cutting-edge digital trend.
A franchise-focused digital agency partner can deliver highly effective hyperlocal geofence marketing campaigns that are custom-tailored to your brand and the unique market of every franchise location, so your corporate team and franchise owners can focus on operations. iluma Agency’s comprehensive integrated digital marketing program maximizes reach, engagement, conversions, and profitability for franchise brands.
To learn how iluma Agency can make your brand shine with our proven franchise development services, contact us today.
Nearly 70 percent of the B2B buying journey happens online—but it isn’t a linear process. Your prospect franchisees often start their journey online and then ping pong back and forth between personal interactions online, something like this:
Because so much of the buying journey happens online, you need to think about how you turn website visitors into prospects and prospects into customers. Your website should guide visitors to the content that they need to know to learn more about your franchise offering.
Franchise recruitment websites should have a variety of ways to get in touch or learn more about you, including:
Website designs shift and change with time. And while you may not need to always have the most modern design, over time your website will become more and more dated. Today’s websites feature edge-to-edge imagery to maximize the space.
Even fonts change and need a good refresh. To feel good about choosing to work with your franchise business, a website visitor needs to know that you will adapt and grow with changes in the marketplace.
Sometimes franchises update their branding and their B2C website but neglect their franchise recruitment site. Keeping your franchise recruitment webpage consistent with the latest branding helps capitalize on brand recognition while demonstrating franchise marketing capacity.
As technology improves, expectations for websites also change. If your website is outdated, it likely has slower load times than the industry standard. Those slow load times will hurt your SEO and lead your visitors to abandon your site before getting the content that they came for.
Old technology, such as Flash, can slow down your franchise recruitment website immensely. Evaluate your load times using Google’s PageSpeed Insights to learn more about your opportunities for improved load times.
