What is Geofencing?

Geofencing can be used to achieve many of your company goals. It’s up to you to first determine what your goals are. For instance, you chose to integrate geofencing to help reconfigure spending on fleet management. Or you could be improving current digital marketing tactics and need guidance honing in on a local audience.

Additional areas you can incorporate geofencing in the workplace include, but certainly aren’t limited to:

• Drone management;
• Audience engagement;
• Human resource management;
• Asset management;
• Internal security/law enforcement;
• Business automation.

You’ll want to take the time to reassess your current processes to determine what areas are doing well and where could use improvement. Be sure to communicate with your team along the way and educate them on any changes made.

There are two approaches to using geofencing technology — active and passive. Each has its advantages:

• Active geofencing is a real-time approach to continuously track a device’s location, monitoring the movement in defined geographical boundaries. This approach needs GPS, cellular, or Wi-Fi signals to determine the position of a device as it moves in and out of a designated geofenced area. Services must be enabled and an active internet or data connection for the real-time communication of active geofencing.

• Passive geofencing uses fewer resources and is more of a lightweight approach. Instead of continuously tracking a device’s movement, passive geofencing periodically collects data when triggered by certain events — such as when a device connects to a Wi-Fi network, or a specific app is opened.

Depending on how often you’d like alerts and response time, you may choose one over the other.

Geofencing itself is not tracking software. However, it does work in correspondence with tracking software like GPS to monitor movement from a given item (like a vehicle or drone). Geofencing cannot track a location if what you’re monitoring does not have GPS or other tracking technologies.

While they sound the same, there are differences between geofencing, geotargeting and geolocation — each task is used for different reasons. To reiterate, geofencing software is used to put a digital perimeter around any given space.

Geolocation involves tracking a device’s location with the help of GPS, cell phone towers, Wi-Fi access points — or a combination of these tools. Geolocation can be used alongside geofencing when determining a device’s location within the perimeter set by geofencing technology.

Geotargeting is a more advertorial approach. It can use geofencing and geolocation to deliver targeted marketing content based on a device’s or user’s location.

Depending on what your goals are, you may use one or all of these methods.

Companies that offer fleet management solutions also usually offer geofencing software, including Verizon Connect.