A 3-Step Digital Event Marketing Strategy

Digital Event Marketing Beyond the Geo-Fence

Digital advertising is often overlooked in trade show and event marketing. The most common digital tactic involves setting up a geo-fence around the event and serving ads to people who are active on their mobile apps or mobile browsers at that location. While marketers see some success with this, the targeting pool tends to be relegated to a small percentage of an already-limited audience.

Matching a mobile strategy with other techniques, however, can have a major impact. Using geo-fencing as a single piece of a 3-step digital event marketing strategy can guarantee greater ROI.

1. Geo-fence the event location so you can capture as much of your target audience as possible. B2B marketers at trade shows find this particularly useful in driving extra traffic to your booth or speaking event. Event sponsors can use this as another channel to highlight the messaging they already have in place at the location.
2. Geo-fence outside the main event grounds in adjacent sites, such as hotels or coffee shops. These ancillary locations (to the event) support mobile and cross-device outreach in the off-hours when someone might be spending more time online.
3. Take your event targeting beyond the event itself. Mobile audience activity can be followed up post-event. The mobile devices captured at an event can be matched to home and office audience IDs. This is a new addition to the digital event marketing playbook that can map users across platforms, devices, and locations.

We can use the example of targeting the 2017 Super Bowl as a way to demonstrate these techniques in action. First, a few facts we need to know:

• • Event location: NRG Stadium, Houston
• • Seating Capacity; 71,500

We know the Stadium location we need to geo-fence, and we can expand that coverage to the surrounding area for support targeting. These areas include parking lots where people are tailgating, hotels where attendees are staying, and coffee shops where they might browse their devices. Here’s a quick look at the area, with these locations highlighted:

Next, with a known seating capacity, we know whether the size of our digital audience correlates to Super Bowl attendance and to the crowds in the surrounding venues. This is an important reference point during a campaign as you deliver impressions and determine what percentage of the audience has been reached successfully and responded. Every campaign should include a measurement component – and Event Targeting is no different.

With digital event targeting, onboarding these mobile devices to the various digital touchpoints they connect to – postal, email, CRM files, and location – gives advertisers the ability to pre-qualify an audience into segments they can personalize. Each follow-up campaign can then be segmented by geographic region or by appending hundreds of demographic variables, such as affluence or life style, to focus your reach and improve campaign return on investment.

Interested in learning more about successfully executing advanced digital event marketing campaigns? Contact us directly at (978) 684-7580 or info@semcasting.com.

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Semcasting has been an industry leader in audience building, onboarding, and qualification since 2009. We built our own robust database of consumers and businesses, supported by a patented predictive modeling technology. Our IP onboarding and qualification technology — Smart Zones — is backed by an initial patent granted in 2014 and a continuation patent granted in 2016 for device analytics and attribution in support of the Internet of Things. Semcasting's Smart Zones technology is unique in that it allows for far more granular onboarding and targeting when compared to other IP-Geo services — being several thousand times more accurate than a zip-code on average. Our mobile targeting technology, Mobile Footprints, covers 125+ million mobile devices with the ability to map every identified device back to any other location visited over the last 7 to 90 days.