256 Effective Home Builder Geofencing - Greg Bray and Kevin Weitzel Feb 19 2025

Greg Bray: [00:00:00] Hello, everybody, and welcome to today's episode of The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine. 

Kevin Weitzel: And I'm Kevin Weitzel with Outhouse. We have an excellent one for you today. Not the norm. This is not the norm. Here's what we got. So, I was watching TV, and I see these murder mystery shows, you know, like whodunit shows. They always use like cell tower data. Where was this cell phone? How do they triangulate where it was, and at what time was it at this certain place? And then I'm thinking, is that anything like geofencing? 

So, I'm really glad [00:01:00] that today we have Greg Bray of Blue Tangerine, who's normally our co-host, but today is our guest. So, Greg, could you tell us a little bit about geofencing and just a little bit about what you guys do at Blue Tangerine with geofencing?

Greg Bray: Well, Kevin, first of all, it's similar, but it's not the same thing that they're doing on those murder mystery shows. The short of it all, everybody, I don't want to pop anybody's bubble, but your phone is being tracked. Your phone is being tracked everywhere it goes, and the reality is, is that it has to be tracked because otherwise when someone calls you, they can't make your phone ring if they don't know where it is.

So, they have to keep it connected to the network. They have to know where it is so that they can find you when somebody important wants to call you and make it ring. Why they can't not find you when the spammers call, I don't know. So, your phone is being tracked, and geofencing is a marketing tool that takes advantage of that, but it's not quite the same thing that you were talking about there, Kevin. 

Kevin Weitzel: All right. So, before we dive into that, could you tell me one personal tidbit about yourself that has nothing [00:02:00] to do with work, family, or the industry?

Greg Bray: So, a personal thing about me, Kevin, is that I have the most amazing podcast co-host that anyone could ever ask for. I mean, this guy has character. He's funny. He is just everybody's dream for a podcast co-host. And I could never have made a podcast happen without him. And then, on top of it, all the sideburns are to die for. But people can't see that on a podcast, right, because we're audio only, but I'm just telling you, folks. 

Kevin Weitzel: They can't see me blushing either, Greg. Oh, man, I love you. I thank you very much for that. All right, so let's get into geofencing. So, how does geofencing work? How do digital marketers how can they leverage it and utilize it? 

Greg Bray: So, at its heart, geofencing is what we call display ad marketing, right? So, this is showing ads on primarily mobile phone apps, but it works on websites, too, but we're mostly focused on mobile phone apps.

So, you think about when you're playing a game, like [00:03:00] maybe you're playing Angry Birds or Candy Crush or whatever your favorite game is, and the little ads that pop up in the bottom or the ones that show up in between levels or whatever, or you're checking the news or the weather on all your different apps, those ads, those are display banner ads or graphics that somebody's designed. And so, we're talking about showing ads in those locations. 

But the really cool thing about geofencing is that we are using people's physical location to decide if they're somebody we want to show our ad to. So, in essence, it's like, because Kevin went to this place, that physical location indicates to me that he might be someone who's looking for what I have to offer. Therefore, I want to put him on my list to see my ads.

Kevin Weitzel: Can you dive a little bit more into how does it actually work? Like, let's say I walk into Target. If I walk into Target and somebody at Walmart hires your company to geofence target, do I have to physically walk into that store for me to get [00:04:00] targeted?

Greg Bray: So, the reality, Kevin, is, is it's not like you walk into Target and your phone starts buzzing or you start getting text messages or alerts or anything like that. What's happening is the advertiser, the one who's creating the campaign puts, we call it a fence because you kind of draw a line on a map, so that's why we call it a fence. And this line, these coordinates on the map, you draw them around a building, for example, like a store, like you mentioned. 

When someone's phone enters that area, that ID gets logged on the list. And it says, okay, this person visited that location, so they're now on the list to see ads for this advertiser. Then, for the next period of time, typically, it's 30 to 60 days that a campaign might keep someone on the list, when they again open up those apps, looking at those ads, your ad will be in the inventory to show to them over that period of time. 

So, the power of it really comes in the fact of picking the right locations that really narrow in. Your Walmart/Target example might not be the [00:05:00] best one because too many different kinds of people shop at those stores. So, in that sense, picking the right locations is really one of the keys to making this work. 

Kevin Weitzel: So, basically geofencing, you can be more strategic with it. Like, just to paint a picture. If I was a small builder in Wyoming and I wanted to see what is it that Smart Dwellings is doing on the other side of town, why do so many people go visit their sales center? Can I draw a line around their sales center? Is that predatory, or is it just everybody can do it, so it's fair game? 

Greg Bray: Everybody can do it, so it's fair game, and it's actually a pretty common first step in geofencing. So, again, the question to ask yourself is, I'm looking for people who are shopping for new homes, as a builder, and I want to put my ads in front of them, where do people go that are shopping for new homes that is different from everybody else, right? 

Well, a sales center at a new home community is somewhere people shopping for new homes goes that most people don't go to. Now, those people [00:06:00] may be shopping at other stores, but so is everybody else. So, that doesn't narrow it in. So, we have to find those locations that say, hey, someone shopping for a home is going to visit this location that's different from everybody else. So, your competitor's sales office is prime location to help identify those people. 

Maybe some type of a large real estate brokerage office where they're going to meet with their realtor might be an opportunity. If you're targeting first-time home buyers, then maybe, you know, an apartment complex of people that you might want to be selling your homes to, and you could do a campaign of, like, why rent when you can own kind of an ad. So, you might want to fence a particular apartment complex.

Now, granted, a hundred percent of the people that visit a new home sales office are not shopping. You've got the employees, you know, the maintenance folks. There are people legitimately there that are not buyers, but most of the people there, compared to other locations, are going to fall in that buying demographic, and that's what we're looking for. Where do those people go so that we can find them and put our [00:07:00] ads in front of them? 

Kevin Weitzel: So, let me ask you this. So, when a client of yours will come into wanting to do geofencing, how can that home builder better engage with those potential buyers utilizing geofencing? Is it truly just that their banner gets put on a game in an interface, or how much information is actually there? Or is it just that name recognition being popped in their face over and over again? 

Greg Bray: It is a display advertising activity that is not when someone's busy actively looking for new homes that you're trying to get their attention, right? People don't open the weather app to search for new homes. They go there to look at the weather. Right? And so, the idea that you're trying to distract them with your ad, so to speak, and get their attention. It's like everything else. 

You're not going to get the giant response rates because people are looking at other things, and we're often trying to be ad blind or ignore ads, right? We're being conditioned more and more to ignore ads. But they do work, right? Ads do work. We get lots of data that show even that one or 2 [00:08:00] percent response rates, that's powerful return on a lot of ad campaigns. 

So, the idea being of what message do we want to show though, and that can come into what locations we're talking about. I use the example again of first-time homebuyers, why rent when you can own, type of a campaign when you're fencing, maybe an apartment complex. Well, if you're fencing a real estate brokerage that works with high-end luxury buyers, that's not the message that you want to send. You have to have a different message. Like, hey, here's a community that matches, you know, this type of demographic that might be shopping there. 

So, just like all marketing, it's about getting the right message in front of the right person at the right time. That's the goal of all marketing. How do we do that? How do we find out what that message should be? And you have to test them and try some different things and see what those response rates are. 

Kevin Weitzel: It's more of a subliminal messaging because nobody's going to be playing Angry Birds and see an ad pop up and go, Oh snap, I got to buy a new house. Nobody does that. Right? 

Greg Bray: Probably not. But if they've been shopping for [00:09:00] homes for the last two weekends, you know, visiting different communities, and now they see a community that they hadn't heard of before or hadn't considered, it might register and go, oh, that's a community I'm not familiar with. You know, maybe we should take a look at that one put it on our list.

And, of course, we can track if they actually click on the ad and go to your website. We can track that so we can see website traffic that comes from these ads, and that's a powerful indicator as well that the ads are making a difference when you get those clicks over to your website. 

Kevin Weitzel: So, not all of our clients and homebuilders out there are totally refined with their marketing prowess and their outreach. What advice would you give to a hillbilly homebuilder, you know, that Chuck with a truck builder, Carl with hammer? What advice would you give to them as a way to get started with geofencing? What would the first steps be? 

Greg Bray: Sometimes geofencing is not necessarily the very first thing to do when you're marketing. There's some other things that can be more effective, at least from a [00:10:00] response rate standpoint. You know, when you talk about people searching for new homes on Google, whether that's organic SEO or paid ads on Google, things like that, you're going to get a higher response rate because those people are actually searching for new homes in, you know, pick your geography keyword. Whereas again, geofencing is more about getting their attention on the side. 

That said, geofencing is often a lower cost of entry than some of these other campaign types. You can experiment with it. You can try it at a much lower budget than you can typically do some of these other marketing activities. Therefore, for someone who's never done any marketing, it might be a good place to start because, hey, we just want to try something, get a little bit of branding out there, get a little bit of our messaging out there, and it might be an opportunity to do that without having to go all in on a huge marketing budget.

Kevin Weitzel: All right, let's go back to Carl, the builder then. So, Carl, the builder, finally decides, you know what? Maybe I need to make this happen. And he has a sales team asking everybody that comes to the [00:11:00] office, how'd you find out about us? Because that's what a lot of home builders do. They want to know, you know, it's a simple question. Hey, how did you find out about us? Were you just driving by and hopefully not preloading them with the answers? But what are some KPIs that you can utilize to kind of keep track of the effectiveness of this? 

Greg Bray: It's funny because people always say you can't trust what the customer actually tells you when you ask them those questions because they don't recognize all the different times that they got exposed to your messaging and things like that.

One of the cool things about geofencing compared to some other tactics is that you can actually use that phone tracking as part of your conversion measurement as well. While we fence the target areas to put people on the list, we can also fence conversion zones. So, your own sales office can become a conversion zone that we can then track, Hey, people came to visit after they saw the ads.
And so, that way, you can actually measure these ads. You can never say that one ad made all the difference. Marketing is a sum of multiple interactions and exposures over time. Of course, as [00:12:00] people move through the buying journey, sometimes you're not quite ready yet to visit, things like that.

But when you can start to say, Hey, we got this many people that visited the initial location, this many interacted with our ads and saw the ads. And then we had this many more actually come to our sales office even though they never click through to the website, that gives you some indication that you're making a difference here and that you're helping invite people to come through. So, that's one of the big ones, how many people actually visit the physical location? 

Of course, clicks to the website, another key KPI. And once they're on the website, then we get all the standard tracking of people filling out forms or clicking on phone numbers and calling or downloading floor plans, all of those other types of metrics that we can track and measure once they're on the website are powerful too. 

So, at its heart, though, how many people visited our locations, got on the list, how many of them then saw an ad, interacted with that ad in some way, and then how many came to that conversion zone, our sales office or whatever it is that we want them to visit is really the core of the analytics and reporting that we use.

Kevin Weitzel: And just a side note, can you also [00:13:00] see the frequency that somebody goes and sees it? Because, like, if somebody's on an interactive floor plan, and they save a plan, you can see every single time they've saved an iteration of that plan or multiple plans. But can you see that Billy Bob and his wife have driven through your geofence zone 8 times in the last month?

Greg Bray: There is some anonymization of the data, where we don't necessarily get down to the individual device and say, this device has done these things. It's more about we had 10 of these and 5 of these and 1 of these kind of a thing so that we don't necessarily know that it's the exact same person on all of those. Just to protect some privacy that comes into play with this.

Because, again, we are tracking people and their devices. We don't know their names. We don't know their email addresses. The ad network knows their device IDs that they use to connect all this together, but they don't necessarily know that device ID 123 is Kevin Weitzel's phone. That's not the kind of data that we can see. 

Kevin Weitzel: My phone is very boring. I got to be honest with you. I go to the same restaurants. I go to the [00:14:00] same places over and over and over again. So, let me ask you this. Is this a one-hit wonder? Is this a set it forget it? How long should a builder commit to a geofencing campaign?

Greg Bray: The campaigns that we run have a minimum of 90 days to set up and start just because of some of the time it takes to really get things optimized and working and to make sure that you can adjust. Again, you can run it for 90 days and say, worked, didn't work, don't want to do it anymore, and that's fine. 

We've had builders that run in the same campaigns for over a year, and they keep working, and they just keep wanting to tweak them. Maybe they swap out some of the ad messaging try some different things on trying to connect with different messages. But it really depends on what you're trying to do.

You might have a campaign that's targeted at an event, like some type of a home show. Maybe a custom builder wants to get in front of people that are at the home and garden show or something like that. In that case, you might only run a campaign for a few months because you get people at the show, and you show them your ads for 60 to 90 days, and then it's kind of done. There's different use cases, different scenarios that would make sense that might [00:15:00] influence that decision.

Kevin Weitzel: So, is geofencing a standalone entity or operation, or is this something you can use in conjunction with other things like page search and stuff? 

Greg Bray: It is definitely possible to do it stand-alone. However, all marketing works together for greater exposure and understanding. So, typically, we recommend geofencing as kind of the 3rd leg of the stool, with SEO and Google ads being the other two legs, social media being kind of an entity unto itself that has a lot of value as well.

Again, geofencing really enhances and helps target in a different way, but it's also something that, again, might make sense to start with, depending on where you're at in a budget ability and opportunity as well. But usually, we want to do a little more of that search type of marketing first. 

Kevin Weitzel: What are some common mistakes that builders will encounter when they're trying to utilize geofencing?

Greg Bray: I think there's a couple of key mistakes that we see. One is not really narrowing [00:16:00] down tight enough on those areas that you're trying to target to start with. If you just say, oh, all my buyers shop at Home Depot. Well, yeah, maybe they do, but there's a lot of other people that shop at Home Depot, too, that might not be in the home buying market at the moment. So, fencing Home Depot to put people on your list is probably too broad. So, if you go too broad, you're just not going to get the kind of response rates and Interactions that you want. 

The next thing is about not paying attention to the messaging or not thinking through what is the message that you want it to have and what type of action are you inviting people to take. Just putting an ad out there that doesn't tell people the benefits or what you want them to do next or anything else doesn't drive action. 

Kevin Weitzel: As far as narrowing it down to give a kind of a more concise picture, are you saying that possibly just having the geofence around the square footage of a model home in the parking lot versus an entire community? Because if you do the entire community, you're going to constantly be bombarding people that have already bought homes in that neighborhood. 

Greg Bray: Yeah, it's [00:17:00] true doing an entire community, especially if it's well built out. Now, if the community is, like, totally brand new and there's not a lot of actual residents in there yet, or it's still, you know, in those early stages of construction, then that's a different situation than one that's like 80 percent built out with people living there that have been there for several years while they're selling the last few homes. A lot of it depends on those very specific scenarios and situations and will drive exactly how you end up configuring those individual campaigns. 

Kevin Weitzel: So, as far as tactics go, what can home builders do to maximize these results? 

Greg Bray: There's a couple of other kind of interesting layers that you can add to geofencing that aren't always talked about. The first one is is we have the ability to do what we call audience curation. And this is where you can actually layer in some additional demographic data on top of or in addition to the location where somebody visits that can help you narrow the target even more. 

So, for example, we can say we want everybody who visits this location [00:18:00] and has estimated income level between X and Y. Or there's other types of things. We can target potentially by a particular zip code instead of drawing just a generic fence. So, there's some other ways that you can layer in some different types of demographics into some of these campaigns that can make a difference so that you aren't casting quite as wide of a net.

Now granted, if we get too narrow where there's only like three people that qualify, then we're not getting what we want either. You know, you've got to make sure that we have enough included there to be able to have some folks to show our ads to. 

But I think Kevin, one of the really cool ones, is called addressable geofencing. And this is where you can use the computer. I say draw the fences, right? We're talking about marking the locations on the map. You can do that based on an address list. So, what you can do is you can export all your cold leads out of your CRM, load those physical mailing addresses into the system, and basically geofence all their houses.

So that now, the people that [00:19:00] have been in your CRM will be the ones that are on your list for a particular campaign of ads that you're starting to show. And so it could be some type of message about, Hey, we've got this new community opening that you may want to come back and see, or something like that, that you want to do some other type of message to. It's a way to get on the ads of all the people that have visited you at some point in the last two years or something like that and haven't bought yet. 

Kevin Weitzel: That is diabolically very similar to what Dr. Evil would do in an Austin Powers movie. I almost feel like you should be saying some of the stuff in finger quotes, you know, air quotes. Aggressive campaigns, home addresses.

Greg Bray: And I've heard of some other builders who have also pulled like resale listings out of MLS and done the same thing. Where they've loaded up addresses of resale homes or used homes, as we like to call them. Right? And so, that now people that are touring those homes are on the list to be able to see the ads as well. Again, we all know resales is one of the [00:20:00] big competitors out there, right? The biggest competitor.

Kevin Weitzel: The biggest competitor. Yeah.

Greg Bray: So, that's another way So, again, there's some different ways you can start to apply this technology and do some interesting campaigns with it. 

Kevin Weitzel: I want to take a deeper dive into this. So, are you opposed to shaving your head, owning and holding a hairless cat, and sporting a monocle? Would you be okay with that? 

Greg Bray: So, the problem is, Kevin, there's not much left to shave up here, you know? I don't know that shaving my head is really going to give me the look that I'm going for. 

Kevin Weitzel: What about construction zones? Is there anything you could do specifically with construction zones of neighborhoods that are going up before they have sales centers? Is there any benefit to that? 

Greg Bray: It's only going to be a benefit if you've got something that's bringing your buyers to drive through. If the buyers aren't visiting yet because it's still too early for them, then you're not going to have anybody that's going to be put on the list. So, it has to be somewhere that buyers or prospective buyers are coming to visit on a regular basis so that you get them entering the fence, getting them tracked, and getting them logged into your list to see your ads.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, obviously [00:21:00] your company sells the service, so this isn't an ad necessarily for you guys, but is there any advice that you would want to give to our listeners that may want to just dabble or dip their toes into thinking about what they can do with this? 

Greg Bray: I think geofencing is something that, because it's a lower commitment than some other types of programs, it allows for some testing and trying and experimentation. You don't have to make a 12-month commitment. You don't have to commit tens of thousands of dollars to make a campaign and run it and try it. You really can get something running for much less and be able to see what messages resonate, see which ones kind of work or don't work. Try out some different locations and really see if you can move the needle on that. 

So, it's definitely something that's worth a shot, especially if you are trying to say, okay, we've been doing some paid ads, we've been doing SEO, and what else could we be doing, and we want to experiment with this is a great place to look to try and drive that [00:22:00] opportunity to get in front of some other buyers that may not be aware of you, especially because they're visiting your competitors, and now you can get in front of them. That's pretty powerful. 

Kevin Weitzel: Do you have to be a business, or could you be an individual? Could I, like, geofence an ex-girlfriend's house? And then the ads would say something along the lines of don't date Susie. She's insane. She's gonna just steal money out of your banking account. Could I do something like that or no? 

Greg Bray: You know, I suppose, Kevin, if it was worth that, and you wanted to make that investment, I suppose you could try that. So, everybody who visits the house gets an ad later, so. 

Kevin Weitzel: Well, obviously, our listeners know you, but if somebody wanted to get in touch with you or your team to learn more about geofencing specifically, how would they get in touch with you? 

Greg Bray: Yeah, we've got a guide for builders on our website, a geofencing guide, that you can download at bluetangerine.com. And, of course, always welcome to reach out to me at greg@bluetangerine.com or visit our website and do the Contact Us form. That'll get to me as well. Love to have a conversation to see if this is a right fit for somebody and if [00:23:00] it's something that can help drive more leads and more sales for them.

Kevin Weitzel: Well, thank you for sitting in the guest spot today instead of the co-host spot. I appreciate you, Greg, and thank you for being here. Thank you for joining us today in The Home Builder Digital Marketing Podcast. I'm Kevin Weitzel with OutHouse 

Greg Bray: And I'm Greg Bray with Blue Tangerine. Thanks, everybody.