What is Geo Conquesting and How Does it Work?

The fight for brand loyalty is more competitive now than ever before. 73% of today’s shoppers are willing to consider a new brand if they experience poor product quality, a lack of selection, or better prices elsewhere. Consumers can always be swayed by a new brand with superior customer service. Brands can also attract new customers by offering incentives such as easy delivery or a flexible return policy. All of this opens up the possibility of winning over new customers through geo-conquesting in marketing.

Types of Geo Conquesting Strategy

As more brands and marketers are discovering the power of geofencing marketing, they are weighing upon the four best practices.

• Retargeting your own customers
• Using cross-device matching
• Winning over new customers
• Thinking outside the box to find an audience that has an affinity for your brand.

Geo-conquesting is a strategy that combines a few of these best practices and helps brands, businesses, and marketers win market share.

What is Geo Conquesting and How Does It Work? 

The geo-conquesting definition is when you use location data to identify a brand’s competitors in an effort to promote a competing or competitive offering to their customers. Using a geo-conquesting platform you are able to create an offering that serves advertisements based on location. It involves targeting visitors to competitor locations through geofencing. You can advertise to this cohort with messaging trying to win over customers based on price, convenience, quality, and overall brand value. This is also a good time to offer a new

Geo-Conquesting vs Geofencing

The concept of geo-conquesting is slightly different from geofencing. When you use geofencing, you are establishing a virtual perimeter around your business, where your content is visible and triggers an action when consumers are within that specific area. 

Geo-conquesting means that you are attracting customers away from your competition and towards your brand instead when they are in a specified geographic area; usually around your competitor’s location. 

When your target consumer shops within your area, and at a competing business, you can push timely ads that attempt to draw them away from the competition. Geofencing and geo-conquesting are different concepts, but when deployed together you can target specific consumers in a specific space, and attempt to lure them away from the competition when you capture their location at or near a competing brand. 

The easiest way to differentiate between the two concepts is to remember that geo-conquesting is used to conquer other competition. 

How are Brands Using Geo Conquesting? 

All retailers and brands have direct competitors. To win market share from them, you can use geo-conquesting marketing to find and reach those audiences. Walmart could target Costco shoppers. Home Depot could target Lowe’s shoppers (and vice versa). 

This tactic works with small businesses as well. If an agency is hired by a local pizza shop, they would want to target diners who visit other local pizza restaurants as well as those who pick up from Domino’s, Pizza Pizza, and Pizza Hut in the same area.

Indirect Advertising Examples 

There are two different types of indirect geo-conquesting. One involves targeting audiences who visit locations nearly identical to your own. The other involves targeting locations where products somewhat similar to yours are sold.

Quick Service Restaurant

One of the best examples of geo-conquesting mobile marketing is Moe’s, Southwest Grill. This quick-service restaurant’s digital agency ran social media campaigns to increase app downloads, and coupon redemption, drive foot traffic and ultimately win market share. On top of targeting visitors to Chipotle and Qdoba, Moe’s direct competitors, they included diners at Mexican restaurants in their audience. They figured if a diner likes Tex-Mex food in general, they would be willing to give Moe’s a try. Moe’s saw a 67% increase in app downloads using geo-conquesting audiences compared to other audiences they included in their campaign.

Entertainment and E-Commerce Sales

Another great example is Sony Music, Their digital agency was working to drive sales of a new Elvis album full of gospel tunes released long after the King’s passing. Where is the best place to find Elvis fans? Graceland, of course. The agency geofenced Graceland, the home of Elvis and a major tourist destination in Memphis, TN, to target Elvis fans and offer them the never before heard album. The campaign was a huge success.

Combining Methods

The most successful geo-conquesting campaigns use both direct and indirect methods.  

Gyms and fitness centers are great examples of how both direct and indirect methods come into play.  If a Burn Boot Camp marketer is tasked with increasing memberships, they can geofence fitness centers with similar class offerings as well as other types of group classes.  The marketer could target Orange Theory fitness centers, cross-fit gyms as well as yoga and Barre studios.  

To take this a step further, the marketer could also find those with an affinity for working out by targeting visitors to stores that sell fitness apparel and equipment. They could target shoppers at Athleta, Lululemon, and Under Armour as well as the fitness apparel sections of department stores. (Advanced marketing, such as Mapsted’s tools lets you target stores inside a mall.) 

Why do Businesses opt for Geo-Conquesting? 

With stiff competition from competitors, it is important to stay at the top of consumers’ minds while they are browsing nearby stores. The idea is that if a marketer can offer a deal that is more persuasive than the other leading store they can entice customers to their store instead. It is a hyper-personalized strategy that utilizes the best of what technology has to offer in the marketing space. Using geo-conquesting software seems like a no-brainer for marketers to stay competitive.