Surrounding Your Prospects With Mobile Love

Digital Marketers

“The very best marketing comes from observing consumer behavior and inserting your message into their behavior.”

In August of 2013, eMarketer.com confirmed what we already suspected.  “The average adult will spend over 5 hours per day online, on nonvoice mobile activities or with other digital media this year, eMarketer estimates, compared to 4 hours and 31 minutes watching television.”  “Time spent with mobile has come to represent a little more than half of TV’s share of total media time, as well as nearly half of digital media time as a whole. The bulk of mobile time is spent on smartphones, at 1 hour and 7 minutes per day, but tablets are not far behind.”

So how do we surround our prospects with love?  Mobile Geofencing.  Also known as Location Based Mobile Advertising, the use of a prospect’s physical location to serve relevant ads is exploding.  Geofencing is when you use location to define a distribution area for targeted advertising and believe me, accuracy matters.

There are two ways to target a prospect on their mobile device.  One method uses zip codes as the targeting center.  When they geofence a location, they use the geographic center of the zip code as the assumed location for center of the fence and measure and distribute ads out from this center point.   So if you are a restaurant wanting to attract customers with a lunch time campaign, your target radius may be one mile.  If your targeting provider uses zip/code tower method, you could be spraying a significant portion of your messages to mobile users literally miles from your location.

The technology licensed by PNS Digital is much more accurate.  Our program has mapped the U.S. into 100 meter by 100 meter grids using true lat/long locations.  We know we can target individuals inside of 100 meters from their exact location.  And targeting does not have to be a radius.  We can target based on a variety of geographic factors.  We can also target consumers based on a variety of demographic factors (like Households with income +$75,000, ethnic diversity, average amount spent of healthcare) and travel history (like Average number of visits to Fast Food restaurants). 

The other consideration in mobile targeting is the distribution network that your ad will be seen across.  PNS Digital has access to more than 8,000 mobile sites and mobile apps, including ESPN, MovieTickets.com, NPR News, Accuweather and Angry Birds, reaching 70 million monthly users.  

True geofencing allows you to customize the area to be geofenced.  Most common is the radius, but you can define almost any unit of geography – like a neighborhood.  Here are the three most common forms of geofencing:

Real time proximity to an advertiser – is the prospect across town or across the street?

Real time proximity to an event or location – AT&T Center, Fiesta, Sea World, North Star Mall, UTSA, USAA,

Targeting based on location history – We are back tracking like the NSA, but your smartphone tracks where you have used it for the previous 60 days.

One of the steps in running a geofencing campaign is to determine how many weekly impressions are available.  Once you determine the targeting parameters – like a one mile radius, 500 meter radius or a neighborhood, we will run an “Available Impressions” report to show you how many weekly impressions are available within the fence.  This will help with budgeting and estimating the Share of Voice costs.   

Next week I will share with you some ideas on how to use the technology of mobile geofencing.  As always, let me know if you have any questions!