Geofencing Strategies and Marketing Success with Keegan Zoller

Welcome to Media Minds with your host David Wolf.

Welcome to Media Minds. I'm David Wolf, your host. Joining us on this edition of Media Minds is Keegan Zahler. He's born and raised in upstate New York. He moved to Tampa, Florida to start a marketing company. That company's called VC Solutions, and these guys, they specialize in strategies such as geofencing. We'll learn more as we dig into this. He also serves as president at the The Brian Martin Foundation. This is a nonprofit directed at, at giving scholarships to underserved high school golfers. Keegan, welcome to the program.

David, thanks so much for the nice introduction. I'm really happy to be here.

Absolutely. I mean, we just really like to, to peel back the onion on all things entrepreneurs that touch the media space. So wanted to find out a little bit about your trajectory. First of all, so VC Solutions, I wanna dive into geofencing from a, you know, just what is that and how does it work for our audience's benefit for those who don't know, but what What inspired you to start this company and have things evolved at all since you've started?

Yeah, definitely. Always a good place to start. You know, for me personally, you know, I've got a really close-knit family. And so for me, you know, what inspired me to kind of get going was actually what my grandfather used to say, which was the freedom of choice. And so he would tell me when I played basketball, I was a college athlete playing basketball, that how I reacted to things that happened to me. I had the freedom of choice to choose how I interpreted what happened to me. Something that was good, I could interpret it as good or bad. Something that was bad, I could interpret it as good or bad. And so leveraging that in my ability, in my career search, led me to believe, ha, I also have the freedom of choice to do not only what I want, but I can serve the people that I feel I could help the best. And so it kind of just one thing led to the next. All of a sudden I was working in insurance for a little bit and I just said, Hey, remember the choice thing? I can go out and I can start a company that serves people in a way that is impactful to me and to them. And so that's kind of how I got started and we've been running with it ever since.

Started in insurance. Interesting. So it was the sales side of that?

Yeah, I was doing sales, just like cold calling and stuff. It really gave me great perspective on how to just deal with people saying no, you know, cause you just, you get told no a lot in sales, but it also It just gave me great perspective, you know, in business as well. And just seeing, you know, different types of sales strategies, which actually helped me now where I'm managing a sales team, you know, who's selling our geofencing strategies and our marketing strategies. It helps manage that better, but also, you know, leaning into the marketing side, so important for marketing and sales to be coherent. And so it's, it's just been a great little lever for me to, to have that background.

Right. Yeah. Marketing the big picture, the branding. And then I like the way your use of the word coherency or consistency across across so that the salespeople are talking the talk that the marketing people want, you know, thinking of it from an enterprise level. And so you're dealing with— how big is your team, by the way? We're actually—

so we're only 5 people. We've got—

it's a nice size team.

Yeah, we like to keep it small, and that's not, you know, for any reason. We're thinking about, you know, scaling and getting bigger, but for now it's nice for us.

Do you have a particular type of client that you like to target for the services you provide?

Yeah, there's actually two that we've really started to focus on. Well, three, technically. One is more of a longer-term play and it's companies that are seed, pre-seed, or Series A companies. We'll provide go-to-market strategies through our geo-fencing. And so this is kind of newer for us and I want to lead with it because it's something that I really want to get out there. Our geo-fencing, which I know I'm happy to dive into more, but it allows us—

Yeah, let's do that.

Yeah. It allows us to set fences around a physical location or a demographical audience. And so what we're able to do is serve ads only to the people cross through those digital fences. So it's much more efficient, right? And effective because you know who you're serving. So take a company that maybe is a brand new product and they want to learn about their audience. It's a really effective strategy to get in front of an audience, then create a lookalike audience in a new city or new area to start to scale after they've received that funding. So those are companies that we've just started kind of working with, but our backbone are home services. And medical and dental. Those are, you know, our primary, you know, companies that we'll work with in terms of just, you know, regular companies. But I just wanted to lead out with, you know, those investment opportunities that we've been into because we've started to dive into that field. And so it's important that obviously I let people know, hey, we're working with these types of companies.

Yeah.

Yeah. This is the earlier stage. So it's geofencing. Yes, it's, it's, it can be data or it can be physical.

Yes.

These are involving paid ads on social. Is that a good way to think about what you are geofencing and targeting?

Yeah. And so, well, first you want to, you want to understand that how we're, we're picking up is the IP addresses based on where we're setting the fences. So it could be an audience, right? It could be, hey, this company only wants to hit business owners that are 45 years and older, and we're able to, to find that audience and serve them the ads. Now, the actual ads themselves, They show up across thousands of apps that support location devices. So it's not just like your Facebooks or your Instagrams. It could be, you know, the games that you're playing on your phone. It could be the websites you're visiting online. It could be your social media apps, but it's any app that supports location services. So we did a study actually called The Missing Element, and it says that on average, people are spending 7 hours a day on their phone, only about just under 2 hours a day they're spending on Google and Facebook. And so if you're only hitting them on Google Ads and Facebook Ads, you're leaving, you know, all these hours that they're on their phone that you're not hitting, right? 5 hours on their phone, you're not hitting them. So for us, we're able to hit them on that other 5 hours, right? Speaks to the missing element. And so that's kind of where we come in and where we leverage, you know, our data and our ads.

All right, cool. So it's, it's not limited to social media, like the way, as you just described, it's, it's a, it's a broader platform. Play, but very, very targeted and very efficient for the advertiser. So, and so I'll sort of ask the reverse question. This is an effective way to target well. What have been your observations about mistakes that companies tend to make around marketing?

Yeah, good question. And I think there's, there's a lot of them really. They're just centered around failure to understand the audience. And it's so, it's what I structure all of our campaigns on is like, hey, like We want to understand who first you want to serve. Then we're going to create the ad to speak directly to them. And I think a lot of times people will just create content and they'll put it out. And it's kind of just like a hoping. You're just hoping that this content resonates, but there needs to be work on the front end to understand who do I actually want this content to resonate with? Because then two things happen. One, it either resonates and it works, or two, it doesn't resonate. And then you're able to learn and fix that so you can improve going forward. And so without the initial upfront work of actually saying, hey, who's my audience? Who do I want to serve? That's where the marketing content fails. Then, you know, the company comes back and says, hey, all this content looks great, but it didn't work. And it's because there was no upfront plan on, well, how are we going to measure its effectiveness?

Yeah, exactly. And you point to something that I think a lot of companies and entrepreneurs do. They tend to lead with their skill sets and try to force feed their own agenda into a market that they think will like it and you hope it's not a strategy. So this sounds like really the idea that you reverse engineer from the pain points of the people you want to reach and really, really truly understand who they are, the who behind that need, and appeal to them emotionally and all the other ways. Don't start with your skills necessarily first. These are things I'm thinking about in our business as well too. You know, we're really good at production, so consequently we're, we're out there selling production to people that may not care about production, you know, as an example. You know, and so this is— I'm sure we could find a lot of examples of this sort of phenomenon. Um, it makes sense. I mean, you're really— your head— you're so heads down and involved in what you're— what you do and what your team does, and you want people to know. And so that's not really what matters, you know. So it's interesting.

Yeah, thanks.

So any other mistake? Any other sort of like— that's a big one. I mean, we could stop there, but are there any other mistakes or sort of things that companies that you're working with tend to trip over that you find yourself needing to instruct them about how to do better?

Yeah, I think I touched on a little bit, but it's just the improvement aspect. I think for us, we collect so much data on our, through our geofencing and we're able to say, hey, this ad received, you know, 1,500 impressions and this ad received 2,000 impressions. Well, that tells you a story. It tells you that people are resonating more with this ad. And so I think a lot of times marketers will put it out and even if they do understand their audience and even if they do go, they forget a lot of times that you can use the ads to actually improve as you go. And so I just would tell like any marketers, whether you're a freelancer, you know, or an agency or a company, it's just like the stuff that you're doing, you know, review it and reflect on it and use it to improve because you don't always have to test stuff, you know, out in the market. You can actually test what you're, what you're doing yourself to really improve. And so that's a huge thing that we've seen, not only just because we get that data, but we put, place a real emphasis on putting out the ads and then looking at the data and saying, how can we improve it? And then using our own stuff to get better.

And it sounds like that's not a destination, it's a journey. You could do this forever. You could continually iterate. The market's shifting. And I mean, you know, I guess there's an endpoint at some level, but this idea that you're constantly improving it is very interesting. You have a foundation of values that you shared a little bit about. Is it your dad? Who is it that you were talking about earlier in this segment? My grandfather. Grandfather. It was your grandfather who talked about the power of choice. And I love that because yes, you know, we have a tendency to trigger off of a lot of the externalities that are thrust at us in this very busy, bustling world we live in. And sometimes it's a reflex, reptilian reflex rather than, you know, real thought process. So that, that led you into starting the business in sort of a vocational sense of the word. But how does faith, this idea of integrity, You walk the walk, you talk the talk, and your own family, knowing they're essential to who you are, how do these things influence the way you conduct business and build relationships in the business?

Yeah, I think, you know, each one is important in its own sense, but also tied together, they're all important. And I'd like to just take a second to touch on each one, you know, starting with family. And family's been so, so important to me in my life because it's like, So I have 3 siblings and, you know, we always call it like the built-in best friends. And it's like you have a support system right there in your family. And when you actively support each other, you know, it just adds so much confidence to yourself and the things that you're doing. And so my family is so huge to stay close to and to, you know, be the center focal point of the, of where I'm going and what I'm doing. And so, you know, just, I always like to start with that, but the other thing I really want to go over. Is, you know, something, you know, that happened in my life and, and is really regardless of your religion, but having faith. And, you know, in the Bible it says in Mark 9:35, it says that if you wish to be first, and I think for me personally, when I was younger, I really always wished to be first in my life. And it says that if you wish to be first, you must first put yourself last and in servant of all. And I think it's a really great perspective to have, especially being a business owner, is that, hey, I do wish that our business is number one and I wish that, you know, I'm number one, but the real first is to be in servant of my employees, the companies that we work with, the people on the street that we talk to. And so understanding that perspective has just given me such a great framework to represent our company and understand that, hey, we are here to be in servant of you, your people. And it's just a great foundation, I think, to have, you know, all of your life, again, regardless of your religion. Just that perspective is really, really great. And so, you know, I just touched on my faith and my family, and then I think integrity ties into both of those things in just being, like you said, you know, both of those things are, are integrity. You, you need integrity for both of those, but just walking the walk, you know, and then talking the talk. And so I think it's more about walking the walk. I think everybody talks the talk, but I think walking the walk without ever talking the talk, I think there's no need to ever talk the talk at all. I think you can just walk the walk., and the other people will talk the talk for you because they'll see how you walk. And so I don't mean to preach, I don't mean to preach here at all, but that's kind of my theory.

No, man, I think it's great stuff. And don't back away from that at all. I think, I think, there needs to be more of this everywhere with everybody. And, uh, the concept of serving, your, your, these concentric circles is the way I sort of sometimes think about this is, you know, you're, yeah, in business sense, it moves from, if you take care of the people that are with you and working in your business, And then, and then they naturally are serving the customers that, that you are looking to, or clients you're looking to serve. That, that just, that integrity translates out these concentric circles and you broaden that circle. So we're, we're really very much on the same page with that. And I suspect a lot of business owners agree with you around all of this. Well, on LinkedIn, you can find him, Keegan Zoller, sorry, K-E-E-G-A-N-Z-O-L-L-E-R. And of course the company is www.vc-solutions.net. Just like it sounds, VC, Victor Charlie Solutions.net. Any final words? Great section, session.

Yeah, no, just thank you so much for having me on. And like you said, you gave my links and everything, but you know, I wish you continued success and I'm really glad that we're able to connect here.

And you know, absolutely wishing, wishing you all the best. You're a relatively new business startup. Continued success to you. I love the way you think about things. Be well and thanks for joining us on MediaMinds.

Thank you so much, David.

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