My name is Justin Croxton, one of the managing partners here at Propellant Media. We’re a digital ad agency based out of Atlanta, Georgia. I want to talk to you a little bit about a technology that we’ve been utilizing for a number of our clients. It’s called geofencing. It’s part of this whole world of programmatic display advertising. Geofencing is really, really some powerful stuff. It gives you the ability to target people based on the places that they’re going, and you can serve ads to them on their mobile devices.

As a retailer, and as a someone who might be a franchise, any of those things, or even a restaurant, what matters to you is not advertising to the masses. You don’t want to advertise to everybody. You may not want to advertise to all of Atlanta if you only have one location that might be in Buckhead, for example.  That’s what we consider to be the financial district of Atlanta, Georgia. But really what matters to you is how can I get my message in front of those people that are most likely to turn into customers and could turn into buyers of my product, or of the food that I sell at my business or at my establishment.

Geofencing For Restaurants & Retailers

I thought I’d give you guys a practical example of what that looks like. Here we did a search for this restaurant that we’ve been to in the past. It’s called Non-stop. They serve really, really good Indian fast food here in Atlanta, Georgia in Buckhead. One of the things that they may say to themselves is, “You know what, I want to get my message directly in front of people that are close by. I don’t want to target everybody that’s here in Buckhead, but I may just want to hit just a few locations.”

Here in Buckhead, what you not notice or may not know is that there are many really large class A and class B office buildings. There’s also a number of other retailers that are close by here in Buckhead.

Geofence Your Competitor & Target Locations

Maybe, if I’m located here, I may want to target the people that’s here at Atlanta Tech Village, because I know that they’re always walking across the street trying to get lunch. Maybe I want to also hit the folks that go to Buckhead Church on Sundays. Maybe I’ll build a geofence there. Maybe there’s a number of people that go over here to Chase Bank and some of these other restaurants. I think I’ll build a geofence over there as well. Let’s see here, maybe we also want to target the folks that come to some of these restaurants over here.

You can see how precise that we’re getting with our advertising. We’re not targeting all the folks that might be over here. Maybe that’s important, maybe we do want to hit a couple of these homes and a couple of these neighborhoods. We have the ability to do that as well, which is very good, but it gets to a time or to a place where as a retailer, or as a franchise, or as a restaurant, you really want to micro target the folks that you know are most likely to turn into customers for your business and for your establishment.

How Will People See Your Ads (Apps & Websites)

What happens with our geofencing technology is those individuals that walk inside any of these geofences, we’ve now captured the ID to their smartphone devices. We can serve ads to them both while they’re in app. Meaning they’re on an app on their phone whether it be Angry Birds, Words with Friends, Weather Channel. We have access to well over 600,000 apps, so any app that they’re on, they’ll have the ability to see one of our ads on behalf of one of our clients. Then also when they might be on a web browser and they’re on a website that has some form of advertising space and that’s where they can also see our ads.

What’s really powerful here is now you’re getting your message directly to those people that are either really close to you, or that you know are most likely to turn into a customer ultimately. That’s just for us. That’s like the part that we get I’d say halfway excited about. What really matters to us at our agency is reporting, analytics, and what’s your true ROI.

Tracking Online Advertising To Offline Foot Traffic

For quite some times whole world of display advertising was really difficult to track and measure those success metrics for online marketing, because typically people that buy something from your retail establishment are usually going to buy online. Maybe you can track traffic to your website and that’s important. What becomes even more powerful is how can I track or get a sense of what level of foot traffic is coming back to my store, to my restaurant, or to my franchise. That’s where this part of it becomes powerful in what we call geofence or geo conversion zone tracking.

Let’s say you are at Naanstop, is what we showed before, and you wanted to see how many individuals are actually coming back to your location. We can build what’s called a conversion zone directly around your store and anybody, anyone that we’ve captured their ideas when they walked inside one of these geofences, any of these geofences, and then they’ve come back to your establishment after they’ve seen your ads or clicked on your ads, we can now report back on that information. Meaning we can tell you, “Hey, this is the number of times that someone saw one of your ads or clicked on one of your ads and then came back to your establishment.”

Now, we’re getting to a place where we’re not hoping and guessing that our advertising is being effective. Now we know and we feel– we have a level of comfort that our advertising is becoming really really effective for the clients that we’re working with. That’s what matters to us both from down to the reporting in the analytics all the way upward to the traffic and the folks that are actually seeing those ads and clicking on those ads.

Importance of Geofencing Advertising For Retailers

This whole area of programmatic display and specifically geofencing, really, really powerful stuff. If you have any questions or have anything that you want to know about when it comes to retail advertising, restaurants, franchise marketing in terms of geofencing, please feel free to reach out to us. I hope this was useful. I hope it gave you a holistic picture of what this whole process looks like. We look forward to touching base with you. Thanks so much for taking the time. Take care.