Geoframing: A Powerful Marketing Tool

Pick up your phone and open any application. When you do, you’ll likely see a small arrow flashing at the top of the screen. Do you know what it is? The arrow is an indicator, notifying you that the app is determining your approximate location using technology like WiFi and Bluetooth.

Location services improve the experience for users, helping companies create more relevant content and drive more accurate results when someone uses their phone’s GPS. But businesses are also using location services to amplify their marketing and advertising.

According to the website Geomarketing, geofencing is the practice of using global positioning (GPS) or radio frequency identification (RFID) to define a geographic boundary. Once that boundary is in place, businesses can set up triggers that send a text message, email alert, or app notification when a mobile device enters (or exits) the specified area.

Geofencing is a common marketing tool, but it’s only the tip of the location services iceberg. Read on to see how geoframing, the next step in the evolution of location-based marketing, is creating even more opportunities for businesses to connect with potential consumers.

Geoframing is more accurate and advanced

Unlike, geofencing, geoframing doesn’t rely solely on cell phone towers and cookie data for targeting. Geoframing is accurate down to a square meter because it utilizes historical data — location info from users’ apps, for example — and latitude-longitude coordinates to capture consumer information at any location.

More than an accuracy advantage, geoframing:

• • Does not require someone to have location services turned on
• • Works when a person searches the internet and receives an ad placement within the specified location
• • Collects a user’s household IP address by associating it with their cell phone’s Device ID when they return “home”; which is defined by where the phone resides from the hours of 8pm-8am.
• • Can target Device IDs with digital display ads at a user’s physical home address six months after visiting a specific location

How geoframing works

Geoframing technology allows marketers to polygon the venue of their choice on a map. These venues and events could include conferences, shopping malls, sporting events, airports, and more; really, anywhere a large swath of target customers will be at any given time.

At these events, if someone is served a display ad within a specific time period, geoframing will collect their unique Device ID. Because Device IDs are unique to individual cell phones, geoframing technology can then attribute them one-to-one back to a user.

Like Reverse IP Append, which can track IP addresses back to physical addresses, geoframing allows marketers to serve hyper-relevant ads to prospects in the place they’re most comfortable — their couch at home.

Get started with geoframing

While location services aren’t a new phenomenon, marketers are discovering groundbreaking capabilities around the technology. Serving advertisements is more intuitive than ever before, allowing companies to predict where consumers will be, how they’ll behave, and the types of offers they’d like to see while browsing the internet at home.

With geoframing, targeting consumers is only getting more accurate, precise, and reliable. To learn more about the technology and how your business can geoframe as part of your next marketing effort, contact Darwill today.