Delivering unique messaging to the right individuals at the right time is pivotal to a successful marketing campaign. Digital progress and innovation, such as cookie-based marketing, have enabled more personalization than ever before.
Today, IP Targeting and Geofencing represent a whole new level of personalization, specificity, and accuracy with regard to digital geo-targeting. Herein is an overview of how you can utilize IP targeting and Geofencing to run effective marketing campaigns that will set you apart from the competition.
What is IP Targeting?
An Internet Protocol (IP) address is a unique numerical label assigned to a computer network utilizing the Internet Protocol for communication. Essentially, it identifies all devices on a certain network at a given time. Every internet-connected device has an IP address referring to its location, whetherwhether it’s a place of business or home.
IP Targeting is a digital marketing practice that involves delivering personalized content or ads to a website visitor’s desktop or mobile device based on the physical location of the device. The location is determined using the IP address of the device.
IP targeting offers a level of personalization and specificity that isn’t feasible through conventional media and digital targeting iterations of the past. By associating an IP address to an individual/business, you can gather more precise data and deliver highly targeted ads for B2C and B2B prospects.
Leveraging IP Targeting to Benefit Your Marketing Strategy
IP targeting opens millions of homes and businesses to personalized ads delivered through display advertising and email marketing. It is a highly targeted marketing practice that allows you to put your brand message, product, or service in front of the right eyes. With fewer targeted ads, you experience higher engagement and optimize your marketing budget.
To illustrate how you can incorporate IP targeting into your marketing strategy, consider a hypothetical. Let’s say you run a business that sells widgets to a player in the manufacturing sector. Traditionally, your personal sales team may have relied on cold calls to reach your clients. You could spend your advertising budget on traditional display ad campaigns.
A more precise alternative would be to determine the business IP address of organizations that meet your client profile. With this IP information, you can now run display ad campaigns that speak to your target audience directly.
When your sales team contacts these businesses, it won’t be cold calls as you would have already positioned your brand in their sights. Further, you haven’t wasted money reaching businesses that aren’t a good fit, significantly improving the cost-effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.
You can also use IP Targeting to Increase local business foot traffic, market local events, or expand your business within a certain demographic. Note that adding IP targeting to a complete multichannel campaign is among the best ways to leverage this marketing tactic.
You can use IP targeting to complement your broader digital promotional efforts, including email advertising, content marketing, social media marketing, PPC, and SEO.
Geofencing
Geofencing is a marketing tactic that enables you to choose precisely the geographical location where your ads show up on. Geofencing utilizes different forms of targeting, including verified GPS coordinates, street addresses, zip codes, and property plate lines, to deliver digital ads to devices within a specified virtual perimeter (Geofence).
Geofencing and Your Digital Marketing Strategy
You can apply geofencing independently or supplementary to your marketing campaigns, depending on your intended target audience. Geofencing enables competitive marketing tactics allowing you to capture the attention of in-market shoppers in their store location, large-scale events like sports events, concerts, and conferences, among other outlets.
For instance, during a conference, you can send a display ad related to an affiliated organization only to the individuals in the venue. Another example would be a local car dealership building a Geofence within several square miles of the dealership’s location.
This way, they can target car buyers within their neighborhood and limit ad spending on prospects that are more likely to buy. Overall, geofencing allows you to connect with venue-specific, address-specific, and mobile audiences for highly targeted ad campaigns.
IP Targeting and Geofencing Best Practices
1. Define Targeting Criteria
Defining your IP targeting criteria is crucial. You have tomust keep your audience in mind to ensure your ads are personalized to their needs and wants. As such, you must conduct thorough research to determine your target audience before launching an IP targeting campaign.
Your ROI will be abysmal if you’re sending ads to the wrong audience. With your target audience established, you can determine where they will most likely access the internet. Important criteria to consider include location, household type, specific industry or business, consumer demographics, and interests.
2. Don’t Over-target
Over-specifying your IP targeting and geofencing criteria to the point of exclusion can be detrimental to your marketing campaign. Targeting criteria that are too specific may translate to lower conversion rates. It is advisable to define your targeting criteria based on two or three parameters.
3. Conduct A/B Testing
When it comes to optimizing your marketing campaigns, A/B testing is crucial. This holds for IP targeting. A/B testing allows you to analyze the performance of IP targeted and geofencing ad content.
A/B testing involves launching two similar campaigns with small variations and analyzing which campaign has better engagement. This performance analysis enables you to refine your marketing efforts in tune with the more successful campaign.
4. Create Effective Ad Copies
Even if your ads are reaching the right audience, they need to be quality content to convert. Getting too involved in the nuances of IP targeting and geofencing and neglecting your ad copies is counterproductive.
An effective ad copy contains a creative mix of text, images, and/or video, with a clear CTA to draw in prospects. You can utilize A/B testing to assess the performance of and optimize your ad copy.
**5. Enlist the Services of IP Targeting and Geofencing Experts **
To get the best results from your IP targeting and geofencing campaigns, it is best to enlist the help of experts. Effective application of IP targeting and geofencing utilizes a broad array of data and skillsets and may overwhelm your in-house marketing resources.
Partnering with a dedicated team of digital marketing experts can ensure properly executed targeting campaigns. VentiveIQ is well versed and well equipped to handle the nuances of these advanced marketing practices.
The firm understands that working with novel digital innovations introduces a learning curve and a sizeable margin of error. VentiveIQ’s comprehensive IP targeting and geofencing services ensure that your B2C and B2B advertising campaigns stay on track. Contact VentiveIQ today to learn more about how their services can help your marketing campaigns.
Overall, the efficiency inherent in IP targeting and geofencing is miles ahead of what has been available to online marketers in the past. Among the top priorities of digital marketers is delivering a smooth online experience, including high levels of relevancy. With improving technology, many marketers are employing IP targeting and geofencing to drive traffic and improve ROI.