Geofencing is a technology that allows you to create virtual borders around real geographic features. When one of these borders is crossed, the smartphone, which has a particular app installed, initiates various events - such as push notifications, text messages, targeted ads, etc. It’s possible to know that a geofence has been crossed thanks to geopositioning via cellular data connection, GPS, or Wi-Fi.
Geofence boundaries are pre-determined by mobile app owners and marketers.
This technology allows goods and services to be promoted to users in close proximity to the advertised business. Implementing geofencing in marketing can:
Every year, more and more companies are implementing this effective marketing tool in their applications. According to a report by Yahoo Finance, from 2020 to 2025, the average annual growth rate of geofencing is projected to be 23.96%.
Including a geofencing feature in your app will help your business:
By default, Android and iOS have a built-in smartphone location service that can be used for geofencing. In most apps, the geofence feature is constantly running in the background, even when the app is not in use.
Several geofences can be tracked at the same time on one device, but every OS has its limits. Android can support up to 100 geofences per app. For iOS, the limit is 20..
The administrator, marketer, or app developer determines the virtual boundaries of the geofence. The shape of the border can simply be round, or polygonal. After the boundary is set, it will activate pre-programmed actions like data analysis and smartphone alerts for users who have installed the app.
Both strategies are powerful location marketing tools and are used for targeted advertising campaigns. But they do have a number of significant differences.
Geofencing is widely used in navigators, shopping apps, and social media.
Sephora has an app for selling its own brand of cosmetics. Customers receive notifications about promotions and discounts when visiting a geofenced area containing retail stores of the manufacturer.
The Burger King app uses geofencing around McDonald's restaurants to promote its own products. In 2018, every McDonalds visitor received a promotional discount for a Whopper at Burger King. This tactic worked, bringing the app from #9 to #1 in the Food & Drinks category in the Apple App Store.
The navigation app Waze uses geofencing to promote its partner brands like McDonald's, AT&T, Shell, and Adidas by simply displaying them on the map. It also gives drivers limited-time offers as they approach gas stations.
Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram and other social networks use geofencing as one of the targeting options when setting up ad campaigns.
Geofencing can easily be integrated into almost any mobile app. Regardless of whether it was written with manual code or assembled on a builder tool, the geofencing API for iOS and Android is all you need.
Here are the features you should add during the development phase.
Geofencing is an effective tool for customer engagement. Developing an app with this technology will give your business a huge advantage over the competition. You will increase customer loyalty and sales as well as collect useful statistics.
With nothing but a visual interface, you can create an app in the shortest possible amount of time, leading to faster profits, and potentially, a faster sale of the app itself.
