Not polygamists, polygonists! Sorry for the confusion. And yes, it’s legal in all 50 states.

Polygons are simply plane geometric figures with at least three straight sides and angles. Typical polygons will have five or more sides, such as those seen below:

When drawn on a map and coupled with device location identity technology, polygons can help marketers identify and deliver marketing messages to your best qualified customers. How this works is perhaps best illustrated through an example.

Case in Point

Working with the data experts at Q1 Media, Elektra is currently developing an advertising plan for a medical marijuana company in the state of Florida. Since 2017, medical marijuana has been legal in the state for the treatment of a wide variety of medical conditions. Those conditions include chronic pain, sleep disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), cancer, and many more. Drawing polygons is an important part of our advertising strategy. Here’s why…

The Challenge

Businesses in this category face two issues:

  1. How to advertise to those best qualified prospects (those with the conditions treatable with medical marijuana) with minimal waste, and
  2. Finding media willing to take advertising messages in this category (major media such as radio, TV and outdoor may not accept such advertising).  

Enter Device ID Targeting.

The Solution?

It’s in your pocket.

Every smartphone is a location tracking device. And it’s not simply the location services native to your phone that make this so. The typical US smartphone has an incredible 80 apps on it, many of which have location services turned on by default. After all, how useful would your Uber, Facebook Marketplace, or Weather app be if they did not know where you are?

Listen to What They Say, Believe What They Do

People do, indeed, “vote with their feet”. In our medical marijuana service example, we know that their prospect’s behavior is one of the best indicators of their intent. Those most likely to benefit from, and be receptive to, the idea of using medical marijuana to treat their conditions will be the people with those conditions. By drawing polygons on a map around treatment centers for those specific conditions, we can identify smartphones that enter those areas over a given period of time — even if that time is in the past. In our Florida example, we identified over 60 viable locations to capture device IDs, including treatment centers for chronic pain, PTSD, cancer, etc. All told, we were able to identify tens of thousands of devices (smartphones) that had been present at these locations. Once identified, we are able to send advertising messages — display ads, or even streaming video — to those smartphones. Additionally, we are able to see what home networks these devices connect to (via IP address) and then to send ads to those devices, whether they be computers, tablets, or even connected TVs (CTV).

A few more examples:

  • A personal injury attorney specializing in car accident victims could draw polygons around collision and auto body repair shops and send ads to those devices.
  • A Chevy dealer who wants to “conquest” Ford truck buyers and get them to consider an a Silverado instead of an F150 could draw polygons around the local Ford dealers and start delivering ads to the people who visit them.
  • A spa dealer could draw polygons around the event location of the market’s Big Home Show as well as his local competitors’ locations and start sending ads to the devices detected there.

In fact, drawing polygons around the competition’s locations could be one of the smartest marketing tactics of all.

It gets even better.

Visits to your store by people whose devices received your ads is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI), and one that is available in real time through an analytics dashboard that is part of every Device ID campaign. We are able to identify the devices to which advertising messages were delivered and then showed up at your location at a later date. This means that you’ll know how effective your campaign has been, with measurable ROI.

Will this work for my business?

Look at a map of your market. If you’re a bricks-and-mortar SMB (Small or Medium-sized Business), approximately 80%+ of your customers come from within a pretty well-defined area around your location. For most businesses, that radius is between 5 to 20 miles. But within that radius most businesses can still refine their target much further. Where do the people most likely to need, want, or benefit from your product or service go? What specific locations are they likely to have visited? If you can identify those locations, you are well on your way to a marketing campaign with greater precision, relevance, and engagement, and far less waste. 

John Wannamaker famously lamented, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Technological advances, most recently with the advent of the Internet era, have enabled continued improvement in audience targeting and efficiency. Though we may never get to “zero waste” in advertising, device location ID takes us another big step toward this goal.

Find out more about how to target and engage with your best prospective customers, by contacting Elektra Marketing today.