Strategies for Startup Growth: Digital Advertising Mastery, Networking, and Geo-Targeting Techniques

Hi, Ranmay. How are you?

Good. Thanks for the invite. Appreciate it.

Sure. Yeah, thank you. So Enradius is a geo-marketing location-based advertising company. We do not do any type of creative work. We typically work with agencies, we work with direct clients. They provide us with the graphics, anything that we need to do, and ad placements. When we work with clients, typically we’re going right in and looking at the geography and where their audiences are and targeting tactically for their businesses and what they’re looking to try to achieve.

What’s that? Coming from the radio and television industries, radio stations, and TVs have this big area that they target. And it was always interesting to me when the internet came into play, what’s going to happen when tech gets better? And now we’ve got faster lines that actually can move video and do streaming and just run and target in specific areas. So I thought of the name Enadius and registered it back in, jeez, 2011. Then I started the company in 2014. And it was one of those things where it was in the back of my head. I worked at Radio and TV Stations for years, and I felt that there was a need in the marketplace. Then I got the opportunity to work in advertising.com and AOL and see what big clients like Papa John’s or Match.com, how they were doing focused targeting. So the beauty of it is now with everybody having a mobile phone, the data and the preciseness of where you can hit tactically for location-based, especially with apps, and where people are located at that moment, it makes it easier and effective. Clients don’t have to spend as much money as they did years ago when they had to hit big areas like TV stations and radio stations.

And so now television and radio are in that digital footprint and they’re all competing for the insane digital dollar. So we see that a lot out there.

Now you’re talking my language because We just created a brand new social media tool called needworking.com and it’s like LinkedIn meets Eventbrite meets Reddit, where it’s topic-based. And so a lot of people meet networking-wise, and that’s how your connections work. But as things change with the first-party cookie and the third-party cookie going away, things are going to be topic-based. So for small businesses, just to start, the networking thing is crucial, just going out and meeting people face to face. But it’s also putting your needs out there. So need working is a piece of that. And we’re excited to build a product like this. I know you build your SaaS products, too. And this is my first big SaaS product and development that we’ve put into play. But it correlates well with what’s happening within Enradius, because when you have a network, when you have somebody that’s going out to events, usually it’s in a location that’s around your town, around your city, and you connect with individuals that might share different clients or be able to talk about business in that aspect where you’re connecting on a different level and it’s more personalized.

So needworking, we call it the intersection of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and networking because everybody has a need. So the problem is people just don’t ask. So just ask. Go out to a local networking event, go to a gathering, go somewhere that actually, you can connect with someone that you might not even know that can help you get into a business and talk to different businesses because you might be specialized, like in Enradiuses where we’re not competing. So it could be a fruitful way for a startup to go out and just talk to as many people as they can and tell their story because that’s the way you start up that company.

Yeah. And the only thing I would add to that, too, is just be concise. As an entrepreneur and someone who always comes up with creative ideas, a lot of the time these startups just are brilliant. They have great ideas, but their minds are all over the place. And you’ll hear like 20 ideas while you’re sitting there having a conversation with them, and you’re like, I just don’t get it. So you got to slow the role just a little bit and just be concise and say exactly what you’re trying to say and tell what you’re trying to achieve and ask for what you need.

Yes. For personalizing different campaigns, what you want to do is find that persona who you want to target based on if you’re a startup, who is your ideal audience? Let’s say, you’re a computer software developer or even AI. Do you want everybody to do it? And if you want everyone to do it, then it’s an expensive budget. But at that point, you have to figure out, All right, my target is, let’s say, I’m a bank. I want to just hit people on a 10-mile radius because I have a location that’s right here and people can drive into my location. I know I’ll do a better job at reaching the community. So from that standpoint, not even the startup side of it, but just general business, you want to make sure that you figure out who your person is that you want to hit and where they are. And ideally, some of the tools that are out there, if you think of Facebook, and their geos are pretty large, half a mile, where in many cases we can go and create polygons around buildings. And let’s say somebody’s been at a stadium, at a big soccer event, or a football event, then you can target those people’s devices when they were there.

There are different ways of targeting and looking at different zip codes. But as regulations and rules change too, depending upon your industry, you have to be cognizant of really what’s happening in different markets. There are certain states right now in the US that are starting to clamp down on what you can Polygon, in some cases, health care. Now you can’t in certain states, you can not like Polygon and Box Hospital or anybody that does primary care and wellness just because of the compliance side. That happened and stemmed from HIPAA regulations. Now it’s just getting a little bit larger. And then schools too. I think some data companies will not allow just any type of Polygon data extraction for elementary schools, middle schools, and private schools. And that’s just for the safety of the children that are there, especially some of the things that do happen. You just never know.

It’s funny you talk about the first-party data because that side of it is the landscape is changing considerably. Next year, when Google gets rid of the third-party cookie in the browser with Chrome, what will happen on that side of it? They’re going to go into the ad side with topic levels. So if you’re not familiar with topics, I would go into Google and search Google topics and advertising just to see how they’re going to start lumping data and audiences for that first-party data. So that’s the first thing, just research to figure out what buckets that you need to put it in. Now that they’ve gone in and they’ve flipped over to G4, the good thing is you can extract the data that’s your data and put it into G4 and create audiences based on who’s coming into the website. Let’s say you’ve got a specific landing page that has a specific offer, then you want to make sure that audience, let’s say it’s a checking account or let’s say an AI type of business. You want to make sure that audience is completely separate from another audience that comes in. So parsing out that data is crucial.

The other thing that we talk about is QR coding. There are so many QR codes that are out there for, let’s say, menus. It’s restaurants and signs. Are you taking that data when they QR code it and put it into your advertising buckets as Here is a sign, here is a billboard? When you start lumping that data, and then you can do the retargeting piece of it and go back after those audiences, along with, let’s say, email, grabbing an email address and any types of data that you’re collecting on your side to warrant to match back on that advertiser later on because it is your data. You must collect it, store it, secure it, and make sure that it’s yours and grow it.

In the advertising space, I think there’s a ton of opportunity, especially video. You know how production takes forever and you’ve got large video production companies that are out there, television stations to produce videos, it takes them a while. Some of the video AI that I think will be on hand where you can grab just things to push out, that will be a beautiful thing. There’s an AI called Beautiful.AI. There are so many different types of AI out there now. It is like an entrepreneur, where your head’s exploding, where you’ve got to figure out which one is the best, like ChatGPT. It’s great, but it’s not as good as Perplexity or with some of the others that have just ramped up real quick based on what they’re doing. I know Bing, and I don’t know, have you messed around with Bing? It’s getting there. How about you? There, yeah. It’s interesting how they started to work that into the search side of things. And it seems like Bing’s traffic is going up a little. That’s another interesting piece, too, where we’ve worked with clients that have done local listings. And coming from the advertising.com and the AOL side, years and years ago doing SEO and marketing, it was fascinating that Yahoo would put Google ads in Yahoo results, and AOL would also use Google. So now Bing is using Google’s if you have your business listing and going back to the startup side of it, make sure you’re going into Google, my business, adding a listing. But Bing will now accept Google listings, especially if you have multiple. So if it’s already approved through Google, Bing will accept it that way, which to me is just wild. It’s like going back 20 years when engines were helping each other.

Yeah, it’s my pleasure. It’s good to talk to you. I’ll talk to you soon.

Thanks, Ranmay.