Conventions, trade shows, and conferences are a great opportunity to advertise to out-of-town visitors. Local businesses, as well as conference and trade show participants, can use geofenced marketing to reach this highly targeted audience. Your digital ads can be delivered right to the convention floor, attracting participants to your booth or table. Local businesses can also use geofenced marketing to send digital coupons straight to conventioneers.
If you can’t attend every trade show in your industry, geofenced marketing is also a great way to get your business onto the floor virtually. Whether your company has a presence at the event or yours is a local business, you can target highly-motivated customers with geofencing at conferences.
What Is Geofenced Marketing?
Geofencing uses cellular networks, Wi-Fi, and GPS, to create a virtual “fence” around a physical location. When someone steps onto the geofenced convention floor with a smartphone, the geofencing technology sends an ad to a mobile app or web browser.
The geofenced area can be any size you want; you can target just the convention center or include several blocks around it. You can target an entire city or a particular building, such as a hotel. In this way, you target convention and tradeshow attendees with your ads.
Why Use Geofenced Ads During a Convention?
Geofencing helps you to promote your products and services to convention attendees in a highly-targeted way. As you know, setting up a booth at a tradeshow or a convention can be a great way to reach new clients. However, it can also be quite expensive. Geofenced advertising can help attract people to your booth, thus defraying your costs.
Another advantage of geofenced marketing is that you can stay home and still have a presence on the convention floor. It could even allow you to attend one trade show in person while having a virtual presence at another across the country.
Geofenced marketing is also a valuable tool for local businesses that want to reach convention-goers. For example, a local restaurant could send digital coupons to people within the convention center or a nightclub could send ads to all conventioneers. These are just a few of the possibilities for local businesses.
You can target the convention center, as well as surrounding streets and hotels. You can create geofenced ads that target people using apps or browsing websites related to your products or services. You can also target specific demographics. It all depends on what you want to do, and what your digital marketing agency can do for you.
Not only can you target a precise audience with geofencing, but you can also create content that addresses the convention or trade show. As Marina Turea of Digital Authority Partners points out in this article, you should create a specific landing page for the event.
Once you make contact using geofencing during a convention, you can more easily maintain contact with convention-goers. Once they return home, their smartphones can still receive your ads, even after the event. This is an advantage if you’d like to remind your prospects of convention-related promotions.
Because of these advantages, geofencing is a highly effective way to spend your advertising budget. Moreover, the cost can be lower than other forms of advertising.
What Should You Consider Before Adopting Geofenced Marketing?
Nearly every business can benefit from geofenced advertising but before you jump into using this type of marketing at conventions, there are a few things to consider.
First of all, make sure that what you have to offer is of value to convention-goers. While restaurants and nightclubs can benefit, it’s unlikely that an accounting firm will. If your business has little to do with the subject of the event and doesn’t provide a service relevant to attendees, geofenced marketing probably isn’t appropriate.
Also consider, you won’t be the only vendor on the convention floor using geofenced marketing. Your ads will be competing with other vendors, all attempting to attract people to their booths. This is why it is important to not only target the convention center, but also the surrounding streets and hotels where conventioneers are staying.
Timing is also important. For example, at the beginning of the event, send out a welcome message along with an offer. Every day of the event, send out a unique message with an equally unique offer. At the end of the event, wish them safe travels, and encourage them to stay in touch.
Consider the best geofencing option for the event. Geofencing can use:
· Cellular networks
· WiFi
· GPS
While GPS is very accurate, geofencing apps that use GPS can drain the recipient’s smartphone battery. Draining their battery with your ads won’t win you any customers. On the other hand, cellular networks and Wi-Fi are both reliable and do not drain your prospect’s battery.
To keep your ads from getting repetitive, send a different message and new offers for every day of the event. Also, convention-goers can go in and out of your geofence several times a day; when this happens, make sure that they don’t see the same ad each time. Otherwise, they’ll become annoyed and ignore it.
Finally, be sure that you safeguard consumer data. If you have collected data on prospective buyers, don’t sell it to third parties. If you do, you could lose both trust and customers.
Geofenced Marketing for Conventions is Effective
Geofencing is perfect for marketing to trade show and convention visitors. It’s useful for both the participants and local businesses. These out-of-town visitors are likely to stay close to the convention center and their hotels, making geofenced ads perfect for these events.
It’s also very useful if you cannot attend a particular trade show and can even allow you to participate in two shows at the same time. Your company can attend events virtually by sending ads directly to convention-goers.
Finally, local businesses that provide services, such as restaurants, can also use geofencing marketing for conventions. It’s an ideal way to attract conventioneers to your establishment, especially if it’s within walking distance of the convention center.
