How and When to Use NuVoodoo’s Latest and Most-Advanced Mobile Targeting Solution – Geoframing

Despite the new privacy controls over the past few years that let consumers have more control over their personal data, location-based tracking (of smartphones) remains an extremely effective marketing tool for brands.  You’ve likely heard the terms Geo-targeting, Geo-fencing, and quite possibly even Geo-Conquesting, which had been NuVoodoo’s state-of-the-art ad tech for mobile marketing.  Until today!  Now, we’re going to introduce you to NuVoodoo’s most advanced smartphone targeting capability yet: We’re happy to introduce “GeoFraming.”

GeoFraming is a digital advertising strategy that leverages mobile device location data, just like NuVoodoo’s other capabilities. But with this new ad tech, we’re able to identify specific audiences who have been in specific areas within certain timeframes.  With Geoframing, we can identify actual consumers – not just their mobile device ID or web browser cookie.

Because we’re uncovering the “who” along with the “what”, when a potential customer crosses into our geo-frame, our retargeting can be more personalized based on the data and more varied thanks to the additional ad channel opportunities GeoFraming allows.  We’re matching captured mobile devices to massive consumer databases, where tens of millions of online “personas” are maintained.  These are based on hundreds of analog and digital “fingerprints” that all of us, even the most privacy-oriented, leave behind.

In other words, this is a game-changer.  We know who it is.  And therefore, how to reach them best.

On average, there are up to 350 separate data flags associated with people who step into a Geoframe.  This information is de-anonymized and then used to target potential customers more precisely with ads after they have left a framed location. Direct mail, OTT associated with an individual’s IP address, and custom or tailored audiences on social media platforms are all fair game for Geoframing.  This just can’t be done with our other smartphone capture capabilities.

Let’s clarify some of the distinctions between geotargeting, geofencing/conquesting, and geoframing:

• GeoTargeting: This term encapsulates a broad array of tactics that allow advertisers to target based on geographic location. Direct mail, zone targeting offered by cable TV systems, billboards specific to commuting patterns, social & programmatic digital media, and mobile phone tracking are all examples of various geo-targeting tactics.  It’s our umbrella term.
• GeoFencing: Geofencing is a more precise form of location-based targeting. It establishes virtual boundaries using GPS or RFID technology and delivers notifications or ads to users when their devices enter or exit these predefined areas. Geofencing is often used for hyper-local targeting, such as delivering ads to users in specific neighborhoods, buildings, stores, or event locations.  While the term Geofencing can vary slightly in meaning among members of the digital marketing community, at NuVoodoo we consider the term applicable to location-based mobile ads served to devices in real-time while they are in the fenced area.
• GeoConquesting:  It’s an upgraded form of geofencing. Typically, we’re serving ads live in real-time to devices that cross into a fenced area, and we can retarget those devices for a period of time afterward.  With Geo-Fencing, once we’ve drawn a polygon or circle around a particular area, we are not only able to serve ads to mobile devices that cross into the fenced area in real-time, but we can look back retroactively over the prior 6 months and sometimes even up to a full year and capture other devices that had been in our targeted area. In this case, even before we’ve drawn the polygonal shape around a location, the location-enabled smartphone capturing event has already occurred.  We’re simply segmenting for devices that had been in our fenced area at some point during our lookback period. This is the perfect tactic for targeting a competitor’s brick-and-mortar location’s foot traffic over a l period of up to several months.   However, it is possible to isolate device capture to a specific time frame, such as during the competitor’s March Madness sale. Or event attendance.  Or visits to a church event.
• GeoFraming: There are 90,000+ Android and IOS apps that use or request location service positions.  Any location-enabled app running in the background, like Apple Maps or Waze, NextDoor, Uber, Doordash, and Facebook just to name a few, triggers what we call “movement data”.  It’s that unique device ping that can be crossmatched back to one of tens of millions of online personas, each of which warehouse about 350 separate data variables.   The cross-matching is what allows us to de-anonymize the captured device and associate the mobile data with a real person –  with name, street address, zip code, contact number, number of children under 18 living at home, owner or renter, military veteran, new car purchaser, pays with Venmo, goes to church, eats at Indian restaurants, registered as a Democrat, gives to pet-related charities, and on and on.
• Because GeoFraming delivers people — not devices — we can employ many more marketing channels than we can when collecting a mobile device ID only.   Now we can include direct mail, custom/tailored audiences on social media, multi-network, multi-platform programmatic video, and display marketing matched to individual consumers via Live-Ramp.

Geoframing’s depth of data allows us to better segment.  Perhaps one offer incentivizes family-style meals and is served to households with children.  Another targets a late-night munchies upsell to college-age roommates.  A final offer targets lunch specials to downtown working professionals.

So, let’s put it all together. Let’s say a new pizza parlor owner needs customers for her grand-opening weekend. Our GeoFraming strategy might look like this:

• One week prior, we draw a polygon around six close-competitor restaurant locations and serve ads in real-time to the mobile phones of people who come into those restaurants to eat (Geo-Fencing)
• And for a short time after they’ve left (Re-Targeting).
• Alternatively, we identify location-enabled devices that have been inside any of those six restaurants over the past six months (Geo-Conquesting).
• We execute a combined strategy involving live GeoFencing and “lookback targeting” of a much larger audience based on historical mobile phone data.
• We can even get extra fancy, and target only mobile devices that have been in any of those restaurants repeatedly and which are still within a 5-mile radius of our new store. We decide to spend more marketing dollars on this audience segment because they’re restaurant regulars.

So we make the additional investment in GeoFraming data capture because a successful switch pitch locks in a consumer with high lifetime customer value.

• We segment the captured, cross-matched frame data and learn that families with kids are a frequent visitor to these competing locations.
• We leverage custom audiences on Facebook and cross-device matching to reach these folks on their connected TV, laptop, smart appliance refrigerator, Playstation, and/or home computer.
• We offer families a loss leader incentive:
  • Buy 3 meals and get the 4th free.
  • With GeoFraming, we send that offer via snail mail selectively to those we’ve defined as pizza regulars who we’re pretty sure still live in the area.

The combination of expensive incentives and expensive marketing tactics is justified because the data identifies this segment as frequent spenders. The flexibility and customization options are endless.

While the terms can be confusing and sometimes used interchangeably, Geoframing’s unique feature is its ability to target users as people and across a wider variety of channels – not to mention retroactively — based on their past presence in a location.

NuVoodoo recommends that advertisers use GeoFencing to target users while they’re in a location and use GeoFraming to connect with audiences after they’ve left a location.

The terminology around these concepts can be inconsistent within the digital marketing community, even with different spellings and names being used.  The experts at NuVoodoo will guide the process every step of the way, leveraging only the right technology solutions based on our clients’ potential to achieve their objectives.