The Value of Using Hyper-Local Creative | Matthew Kilmurry

David McBee: Welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Our guest today is Matthew Kilmurry, founder and CEO of Intrinsic Digital and their family of brands, apartmentgeofencing.com, hotelgeofencing.com, and restaurantgeofencing.com. Matthew has been a pioneer in digital marketing since the early 2000s, starting with optimizing websites for search engine rankings. Matthew continues to stay deeply involved in the industry as technology and tactics evolve. Intrinsic Digital works with over a thousand apartment, hotel and restaurant locations nationwide. Welcome to Simpli.fi TV, Matthew. Matthew Kilmurry: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me today. David McBee: No, it's my pleasure to have you. I'm super excited to hear about these awesome geo-fencing tactics that you're doing, but I want to start out by asking you, we've got a thousand different clients? That's got to be some measure of success. So what makes Intrinsic Digital so successful? Matthew Kilmurry: Yeah, thanks for asking. We do have a different approach and we made this as a strategic decision early on that instead of focusing on large metro level or national buys, that we do individual campaigns for every location. So we have a thousand locations that we work with nationwide, and we set up campaigns specifically for each one doing neighborhood level targeting. And it is a lot more effort. That is sure. But at the end of the day, the results are better. We found that we've been able to provide much better results for those clients. David McBee: Well, with a thousand campaigns, I imagine those are fairly small spends. How do you do that? You must have some great best practices in place. Matthew Kilmurry: Yeah. The average spend is about $500 a month. So what we've done is we've taken what can be a really complex idea, so geo-fencing, location based marketing, and really boiled it down into the things that matter most for those locations. So they want to get in front of prospective guests, prospective customers, and we help them find, basically, where their customers live, work, and play in their neighborhoods. And then we put together a small targeted campaign and make that $500 budget work really hard for them. And so, then we can show them on a monthly basis that, you spent this amount of money, here's the impressions and awareness that was generated, but also, then here are your specific results. And so, it can be a heavy lift working with all those locations. And that's why we don't deviate for to other industries. I have a lot of connections, and so, I'll have somebody from a dentist's office or somebody who's running a large gym chain, exercise and fitness and stuff, and they'll come to us, say, "Hey, can you do something similar?" And the answer is, no. And that was part of the strategic decision from the very beginning, is to really focus on these three industries and try to be the absolute best at it because I think gone are the days where you can be an expert at all things digital. The platforms have become very sophisticated. The teams need to be trained in the nuances for quite some time. And so, that was our idea. Let's do this one thing for these specific industries and be the absolute best at it. David McBee: I keep going back to the idea of a thousand small locations, and I'm trying to imagine the reporting that you have to provide. How do you do that? How do you handle attribution for that many locations? Matthew Kilmurry: Well, I'll tell you, it works well because of monthly recurring revenue. So any agency owners out there watching this, MRR is my new favorite metric because as we onboard new locations, it just adds to the revenue on a monthly basis. So we went from $900,000 in revenue in 2019 and we ended last year at $6.5 million. And it just continues an upward scale because we're able to add them at a reasonable cost for them and provide a reporting that really is valuable to them at the local level. And so, how do we do it? We do integrate with TapClicks. What's great about simplifying TapClicks, they have a great integration together. We're able to pull over all of those stats. So they have an online dashboard that they can log into. We also have really beautiful push report templates that we send to our clients on a monthly basis. And once the campaigns get going, and we've got... That first 90 days is a bit of a heavier lift. But after that, we have clients that we meet with on a quarterly basis. And because we're just a piece of the pie and they're not all in on a million dollar campaign spend, it does level off. We do have a heavy emphasis on our client success team. That is the biggest team on our company. We do cap the number of clients and locations that they can work with so that they don't feel overwhelmed, that we can still provide a high level of service, but it works out. It really does. David McBee: What about creative? If a restaurant has, say, several locations around the city, do you use just one creative for all of them? Matthew Kilmurry: I would love to do one creative for all clients, but what we've found is that it's more effective with a localized creator. So on a display ad, it's easier to do because you get the ads done based on the brand. So it's all brand approved creative. And then we localize it to the exterior image of that particular location, to some local call out. Harder to do on video. But again, we've made the effort to do that. So all of the commercials that we do for our clients, 15, 30-second commercials are all localized. And that is a call-out like, "Across from the mall, right off of I-76," because we want to anchor the viewer to this specific location. And it's very impactful too. I mean, think of it in your own personal life. We all watch streaming TV when it's Allstate ad, after Allstate ad, after Allstate ad, and then, boom, a local creative comes on, local commercial for business in your area and creates a lot of traction. David McBee: All right. Last question, what would you say is your superpower? Matthew Kilmurry: Our superpower is that focus. We implemented the entrepreneur operating system. Their EOS system's born out of a book called Traction that Gina Wickman wrote a decade or so ago. And it really helped us with that idea of what are the things that matter most to us? What is our core focus? And moving everything else off to the sides. And that has kept us laser focused, because in a small agency there's 32 of us, there's limited time, limited money, limited energy. And so, to focus on those things that are going to move you forward and not get distracted has created a lot of momentum for our company. David McBee: Awesome stuff. Awesome stuff. I feel so lucky to have had you as a guest on Simpli.fi TV. Thank you so much, Matthew. Matthew Kilmurry: I appreciate it. Anytime. Thanks. David McBee: And thank you all for joining us on Simpli.fi TV. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.