#032 What's The Difference and When to Use Them: Geo-Targeting, Hyper-Local, and Geo-Fencing

Geo-targeting, Geo-fencing, and hyper-local, oh my! These are some of the hottest buzzwords in marketing, which means they often get misused and abused. In this episode, KeyMedia Solutions CEO, Korena Keys, chats with Beth and breaks down what each term means and why businesses need to be paying attention to them. If you're looking for a trade show strategy or a way to increase student enrollment, Korena shares a killer strategy for you.

Learn more about KeyMedia Solutions at keymediasolutions.com

Biggest Takeaways From This Episode

All three of these topics are targeting terms used to narrow down your audience. Each of these targeting strategies is a way to find the right people and deliver them ads through display.

Geo-Targeting

Geo-targeting is the application of applying a general geographic target. So the geographic target could be city, zip code, state, country, or even television DMA. It's basically using a geographical barrier or area to describe where you want to spend your money in.

When it's used: I would suspect 99.9% of all ad campaigns, whether they're digital or traditional, have some sort of geo-targeting component to it. Mostly because as businesses, we don't have the funds to not have those kind of parameters and we don't really want to serve ads and pay to serve ads to people that are not within your service territory.

Where do these ads appear: Almost all forms of digital advertising has a form of geo-targeting. Think any device that is connected to the internet. examples:

social media
paid search
sms (texting)
display
programmatic
digital billboards
your own app
other apps that allow ads
most advertising for multiple devices

Hyper-Local Targeting

Hyper-local targeting is the application of applying a specific region. One example is targeting a specific part of a city like a neighborhood or shopping district.

When it's used: If you want to target people downtown into your specific downtown business. Or if you have a business with a small service territory like lawn care in a neighborhood.

Where do these ads appear: Almost all forms of digital advertising has the ability to target more hyper-local areas. Think any device that is connected to the internet. examples:

social media
paid search
sms (texting)
display
programmatic
digital billboards
your own app
other apps that allow ads
most advertising for multiple devices

Geo-Fencing Targeting

Geo-fencing is the most specific targeting out of these three options. It's a custom drawn map around a specific location that you want to target. It can be a longitude and latitude, around a specific address or around a particular business.

When it's used: When you want to draw a "fence" around a location and target people within that location, like a tradeshow or event.

Where do these ads appear: Geo-fencing is really focused on mobile.

your own app
other apps that allow ads
display ad on mobile browser

Pro-Tip: Re-target your audience after they leave the geofencing area across multiple devices and platforms.

Limitations of Geo-Fencing:

Volume is the BIGGEST challenge. Anything less than 5,000 people in a specific room or event is NOT going to fulfill the results to be worthwhile.
People have to have their GPS enabled in order to be targeted
Here's the whole criteria: Your target has to be in the fence, have their location turned on, and then actually use a browser or app in order for an ad to be served to them. Then and only then can you even get the option to TRY to get your ad in front of them
So if you're thinking of targeting an area, event, or business where people aren't allowed to use their phone within that fence, it's not a good idea to target them.

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Transcript

This text below is a straight up audio transcript of the episode. In our humble opinion, we think the audio podcast sounds much better in its original form. We have not edited the transcription below so there are indeed some grammar errors (some quite funny, in-fact).

Welcome everybody to Generation Social Media. Today, we are going to start with Korena Keys. She is part of keymedia solutions and we are so excited to have her on the podcast. Today. We are going to be talking about geo-fencing geotargeting, Hyper-local, all the different buzz words that are out there and really helping to define what these words mean and why businesses need to be paying attention. So Korena, please give us a quick background about yourself and tell me a little bit about Keymedia solutions. Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk about geo-fencing. It really is probably the number one inquiry that we get on, on a pretty consistent basis.

So I think it's a great topic today. So I am the founder of KeyMedia solutions, very headquartered in Sioux falls, South Dakota. And have currently have a team of about 12 people. And we're kind of scattered across the United States right now. So we have employees here in Sioux Falls, but we also have team members in Florida and South Carolina and in Iowa. So we're covering at least half of the country and we really specialize in digital media strategy and placement. So how can we better integrate and use the tools that are available to help businesses integrate some of the technical and digital tactics with their traditional and more offline tactics to get results for their business? Awesome. Well, and we love to have fellow agency partners on the podcast, and we're really excited because I think that's one of the awesome parts about our world right now is the collaboration that's happening.

And there's a lot of agencies that maybe specialize in one thing or another, but in the end, I think we all want what's best for our business partners and everybody kind of brings a different approach. So that's one of the reasons why I thought this would be a really good opportunity for you just to share what you know as it relates to kind of the world of hyperlocal and geo-fencing. We definitely do that for our clients at chatterkick, but again, there's, there's a lot of different elements to what that means. So let's just start out by straight up definitions. We have geo-fencing geo-targeting and hyper-local, can you give us a quick brief overview of what these things mean? Absolutely. So to start from the broadest and then focusing on the narrowest, Geo-targeting is really just the, the application of applying a general geographic target. So the geographic target could be city. It could be a zip code, it could be statewide, it could be national, it could be a television DMA. There's

A lot of ways to define a geo-target, but it's basically using a geographical barrier or area to describe where you want to spend your money in. I would suspect 99.9% of all ad campaigns, whether they're digital or traditional, have some sort of geo-targeting component to it. Mostly because as businesses, we don't have the funds to not have those kind of parameters and you don't really want to serve ads and pay to serve ads to people that are not within your service territory. So hyper-local brings it in to a very specified region. It could be an area that's harder to hit or more specific than even a city. It could be a neighborhood or a certain number of blocks or a shopping district could be considered a hyper local targeting. We're still defining the area, but we're becoming more narrow. And we just want to target people that enter inside of that local area that we're trying to hit.

So it could be a downtown area. For example, if you have a business downtown and you want to draw people into your store, as they're walking around up and down the streets of the, of the general vicinity. And then geo-targeting [fencing] is the most specific, it really is. I can be or geo-fencing on the other way. And geo-fencing is really it's really, it's a longitude latitude, or it can be address specific, but typically a geo fence is, is kind of a custom drawn little dot on a map where you only want to target people that are in a specific location. So think about a trade show. If you wanted to geo-fence a trade show to reach people that are attending the trade show to try to get them to your booth. It also works great for local businesses you know, that are maybe wanting to target people in their store to build brand loyalty or to cross promote certain offers or specials.

Awesome. I love it. I think that's a really great just foundation of where we're at right now. So I know businesses are like getting excited because they're like, yes, trade show. Exactly what I want. Let's take a nother approach of like, who tell me where these ads appear. Right. Because people are like, okay, that's a great question. What does that mean? Where are they going to go? How is the one going to see them like tell, take me through that user path. So typically geo-fencing ads are gonna show up on a mobile device because they do use your GPS off of your mobile device in order to target you. And if you, if you think about it, if you're mobile, you're downtown, you're walking in a store, you're not carrying your computer with you and logging in. Right. so a lot of times the geo-fencing really is focused on mobile.

And from that there's a few ways that you can do it. it can show up in apps. So if it's a specific brand, you have your own app, you can use your own app to push messages out to people as they enter a certain fence or as they, they use certain activities. You can also do it where it's more of a display type ad that shows on, on their mobile device when they're on any app or any sort of website through their mobile device within that fenced in area. But where we see the greatest success with geo-fencing is really when we're able to take that and apply it to people also after they leave. So being able to do a retargeting effort to individuals after they leave that circle. So we want to engage them as much as possible while they're there and inside the fence.

But when they leave the fence, we want to be able to target them and do a multi-device, so we want to be able to target all of their different devices after they leave for a certain amount of time. And that can be three days. It can be a week, it can be a month. It can be 90 days depending on what the need of the business is and what that purchase cycle looks like for individuals. Geo-Targeting tends to be a little bit broader. That can be on any device that's connected to the internet. It can be a laptop or desktop. It could be a connected TV screen. It could be a mobile device or tablet as well.

Awesome. And I think just because I have heard this question a lot, and I want to give some clarity into this, cause I think it gets difficult for businesses to understand. So the word, when you say display, most businesses think of that as like banner ads, right? Like that's where it's also known as programmatic. What other names do people use it? Mobile. Mobile. Yeah.

Banner ad, mobile ad. It basically describes anything that fits in a box and it could be animated. It could be static, but that is displayed on a screen. That's how we describe display. Another way to look at it. And another option is, is native advertising and you probably heard of native advertising and it's the same thing. It's a paid ad, but it's a paid ad that looks like it's part of the content of a page. Whereas a display ad tends to have a little outline and it sits in certain places on the side of the page at the top of the page. Native ads tend to be more integrated into the content. So if you think you're watching the local news online and you scroll to the bottom of the article and it's got all these suggested articles that are on the bottom, those are all considered native ads. They're still paid placement, but most of the time they will take you off that site into another publisher site.

Awesome. And do you, so just, I'm going to walk someone through like a path and you correct me if I'm wrong. Okay. So let's say I'm going into a trade show because I think this is really interesting for a lot of businesses that're... You know, their events have looked very different recently. So I walk into a trade show. I I'm sitting there. I'm like I have some downtime in the break. So I pull up a website and I'm looking at my news articles that I love to read on different websites. And all of a sudden I see an ad come up for a similar product or something that's related to the trade show. Or maybe I'm reading the article and right in the middle of it, there's another piece of content that I'm like, Oh, that's interesting. This is the path that you're saying, right? Because that website allowed display advertising to kind of cut through their website and they're getting paid for it. And then you as a user, see that information based on what your phone data is telling you about the location that you're in.

Exactly. And we've had some pretty successful cases where we've used that ad to entice people to come and visit a certain booth number at the trade show or incentives to get them to come and talk to our team while they're at the trade show and engage with us then. So if you're sitting there and scrolling and you see the ad, it might be, you know, stop by booth 224 and receive a VIP prize by showing this, this screen. Perfect. So,

What are some of the limitations specifically on geo-fencing because people love the concept, but let's talk a little bit about what doesn't work when it comes to whether it's population size, geographic size, maybe its limitations on phone devices. Tell me a little bit about why you would, you would say geo-fencing is not the right fit for someone or a certain event.

Absolutely. One of the biggest challenges we run into when it, when it comes to geo-fencing a specific event is volume. It's. It's making sure that not only do the people in attendance have devices, but we have enough people in attendance to really make it successful. And we have found. And what we've learned is that anything less than 5,000 people in a specific room or event is really not going to fulfill the, the results that we wanted to, to be worthwhile. So that's a big, that's a big lesson that we've learned

And that's all only one time, right? That's like

It could be over the course of three days. So it could be a trade show that maybe has 3,000 people per day over the course of three days, or it could be 3,000 people or 5,000 per day. I mean, we've done some that I've been at high as high as 10,000 per day. So that's one of the biggest challenges. The other one is people have to have their GPS enabled because if they don't have their, their location turned on on their device, we can't know what their location is. We can't hack into these things and, and just kinda tell and ping phones. And so we get some answers, but so making sure that people have their locations on, and then the third step of that is not only do they have to be in the fence, have their location data turned on, they actually have to open a browser or open an app allows for advertising to be served to them.

We can cookie devices. So we know when users are in the space based on GPS, but we can't necessarily serve them an ad in real time. If they're not looking at an app on their phone or a webpage that has advertising space available to it. And then even when they do do that, we have to make sure we can win that, that ad placement over everybody else. That's trying to win that at placement. So typically what we see is geo-fencing tends to be a more expensive tactic because you think of it as kind of, it's a large auction, it's kind of an eBay auction for ads, right? And if you've got 10 people bidding on one item, that price is going to go up. And when you think about a condensed space, we're not only, we're talking about a very, very small geographic area, but we're talking about a limited number of people that are in that, that also align with the profile that we're trying to serve ads to. And so the demand for that amount of inventory is pretty high. So we tend to see the geo-fencing campaigns, especially if that related is 2X to 3X higher cost per thousands, then when we do geo-targeting or even hyper-local. So those are, those are some of the big challenges we have when it comes to geo-fencing at a specific event.

And I think so I've seen, let me tell just our listeners a couple of scenarios, cause I think you have communicated that so beautifully of when it I've seen it not work. And one idea that people have, that's really an awesome idea just as, it doesn't always logically word is targeting your competitors employees. And you're like, I'm going to try to recruit their employees to come work for me while just like Korena was saying, you got to have the amount of people first of all. It's gotta be a fairly large employer and then you start whittling it down to say, all right, now we have to have the GPS on. And well, does that employer even allow phones on the floor? Do they even allow phones in their vicinity? And you start getting really, really narrow and sometimes you can't even get those ads to show or display, right? I mean, I've seen that happen in, in some businesses. It's like great idea, but there's not even enough volume there that the ads will kind of come up in their browsers.

Right. One area that we have seen a lot of success is in the rental market, specifically residential being able to target. So if you're a property manager and you have, you know, 10% vacancies in your apartment unit, finding those units where your next potential renter is currently living, and it might be, you might want to find some that have similar on monthly rental costs or, or income levels of what you're trying to target, but we've been pretty successful in saying, okay, we're going to geo-fence these apartment units, because we know that they have a large number of leases coming up for renewal. And so we want to show them our properties and try to recruit them over to us. And so there's a lot of applications for geo-fencing that are pretty exciting and ways that we can use it to really think outside of the box.

And I love that one specifically because when people are home, they are on their computers, they're on their browsers, they're on their phones. And so it makes sense because they're really calling up those placement opportunities. And so I think that's a really great example. Other industries, or use cases that you can find that works or does not work.

Yeah. One that's really emerged this fall. And it's because of COVID is we were seeing, especially in, for colleges and universities and tech schools that students really have shifted a lot in the last few months. A lot of them are taking a gap year or trying to transfer to be closer to home because the thought is, if I'm going to get sick, if we're going to be remote, I might as well live at home instead of paying for the dormitories. And so we've seen a lot of shifts happening in that higher education market. This just in the last few months. And One of the successful tactics that we've been able to capitalize and try to recruit new enrollees and new students is by doing what's called like a reverse geo-fencing. So we know these people have been on college campuses, maybe last winter, but now they're back home in our own community.

So what we want to do is in what we did is we said, okay, for those people, that those college students that are, that are at home in our community for the summer, or because their school's closed down, we want to serve them messages with the close to home message. And we want them to stay near us. And we want them to enroll in the local university instead of going back to the university that they were at, especially if they're considering a gap year or looking at transitioning anyway. And so we've been able to identify certain individuals based on where they, their GPS told us they were last winter for a majority of the time. And specifically we wanted to know if they were on a college campus and in surrounding States and then came back to our local community. And that has been a great tool and very effective for the, for the universities to recruit and bring in some new students that way. I love that! It's been really tough for colleges. Yeah.

And you could use that same tactic, an idea if you're an employer and you're trying to recruit all these college students that are here, that, and you need them to work.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. That to me would you'd have enough volume, you'd have enough audience, you'd have enough kind of opportunity. So I think getting creative, like that is part of it's part of the value that agencies provide. I also think that it's one of the ways that you can make these tools because that's really all they are. Right. They're just tools. It's how you apply them. That makes them really work or not work at all. Yeah, exactly. Okay. So

The technology allows us to, to be as aggressive as our imaginations, right? I mean, there's tools out there that allow us to do anything that we really, really want to do. So how can we take some of these ideas and use the tools that we have in our toolbox to make them a reality?

Yeah. So one of the things I think, and my recommendation on a lot of these tools and specifically when you get into programmatic and display campaigns, I know this is generation social media and we're really talking about display and programmatic. It's not an easy thing to always do when you kind of need software to do it so that you can have opportunities to get into these things. What do you think businesses need to ask people like you or me or other agencies that they're working with so that they feel like they're making educated decisions to know if again, someone just selling them snake oil, which this happens a lot in this space specifically because it's sexy to sell. It's exciting, makes sense, but it's easy to sell. It's not always as easy to service. So what are some of the questions you think businesses need to be asking their partners or their prospective partners to make sure that they know they're in good hands.

That is a great question because that happens a lot. I would want to know the technology that they're utilizing. You know, what tools specifically are they using in order to execute on that campaign and what is the effectiveness of that tool? Because just like everything else, there's different levels of capabilities and different levels of access and not everybody has access to the same technology. So definitely understanding how they're doing it. Is it by GPS data or are they doing it by IP data? Because GPS is more accurate than IP data. So making sure that they understand a little bit about how it's being executed, I would also ask for success stories. What other clients have they done it for? And what were the results of that campaign? Can they give you some case studies on what they've done as it relates specifically to geo-fencing or programmatic or display?

I mean, these are great questions for any partner that you should be asking is, is how have you been successful? What have you done? And have you done it specifically for people in our industry? Because there, there are nuances that make things a little bit different in how we target, especially when you talk medical community or, or privacy and data issues that that come into play that, that provide little nuances. And then also, is it a highly competitive market for attorneys it's a very different ballgame than it is for property managers, you know, so understanding what their experience is asking for their track record. It, wouldn't be unheard of to ask to talk to a couple of their clients and ask them for references, just to make sure that you understand what your kind of, who you're partnering with and how they are going to respond and then manage your, your dollars in your budget for you.

Don't you think too, one of the questions I love when clients ask us this or prospective clients is what are you saying no to, for me as a business, because I think a lot of the times when we're like diagnosing businesses, right, we have, there's so many things we could do. We can do all the things, but I think the hardest part, and probably one of the most valuable parts is to be able to listen to someone's problem and then put together the suite of minimal things, because not everybody has all the, all the resources and the time and all of that, that make it possible. So I think asking people, what else did you say no to, for, for me as a business, for me as a business owner and like let's walk us through the things that aren't a good option either right now, or for my strategy and what I'm trying to accomplish.

Absolutely. I love that. Yes, we did.

Awesome. Well, Korena, your information today was so valuable. Are there any parting words that you want to share about any of these geo-fencing, targeting? Do you any words of advice or I, I want to make sure that people don't leave with, like, this is really creepy tracking because it's not as you, can't get as granular as I think some people

We do not. Right we do not track any personally identifiable information. So we don't have your name. We don't have your home address. We don't collect any of that information. No. And I think, you know, for me, the biggest piece of advice that I always share, and that I tell business owners is we have to always be testing and trying out new things because our consumers and our customers are changing every day and they want us to keep up with them. They want, they do want messages from us when they're relevant and timely. So what I was looking at it it's the 70/20/10 rule. So 70% of your marketing efforts should really be focused on what you know is working for you today. Don't, don't eliminate it. If it's working, keep it at it, keep going, but take 20% of your budget and try to optimize that 70%.

So what can you tweak? What can you test to make it just a little bit better? What can you maybe add in or change in your messages to make that 70% more effective for you? And then take 10% and just try something new, something completely out of the box, maybe something that scares you a little bit, because you never know if that 10% is going to be your next answer. So, but set it up in a way you want to make sure you have clear expectations of what you wanted to accomplish, and you want to be able to measure it, to see if it did accomplish what you wanted to accomplish.

So be intentional about that 10% instead of the tools and the tracking needed to know if it checked all those boxes or if it didn't check those boxes for you, that is some awesome advice. You're speaking my language. I love it. I recommend that across all your digital assets, not just disliked. Well, thank you so much, Trina. We really appreciated your time today. I think we had some really great findings and insights. So join us next time for our next episode of generation social media. Thanks again, Korena!

Digital Paid AdvertisingChatterkickOctober 14, 2020targeting, advertising