Geoframing: A Powerful Marketing Tool for Dealerships

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 dealerships 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, dealerships can set up triggers that send a text message, email alert, or app notification when a mobile device enters (or exits) their lot or showroom.

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 dealerships to connect with potential buyers.

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 boundaries of their dealership on a map.If someone is served a display ad within a specific time period on the dealership’s lot, 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.

Here’s how it works for dealerships:

• • Dealerships polygon their own lots and competitor lots to capture information from in-market buyers
• • Using Device IDs, dealerships send display ads to users at home the next day
• • Dealerships send targeted direct mail to potential buyers within three days
• • 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 dealerships to predict where buyers 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 buyers is only getting more accurate, precise, and reliable. To learn more about the technology and how your dealership can geoframe as part of your next marketing effort, contact Ross Media today.