This weekend, the city of San Antonio will play host to thousands of sports fans from across the country, with the 2017-2018 college basketball season set for its ultimate conclusion. From Friday’s pregame festivities to Monday’s championship game, native San Antonians and out-of-town visitors alike will fill up the Alamodome and soak in the atmosphere permeating the city streets.

Crowds like these — large swaths of passionate consumers with a shared interest in a niche topic — offer near-endless opportunities to reach a target audience. But with Simpli.fi’s Event Targeting solution, marketers can go beyond simply delivering ads during an event. Through the use of unstructured data, they can build a customizable audience based on an event that occurs during a specified time frame, and deliver programmatic advertising to these audiences at a later date across a variety of channels.

On a basic level, Event Targeting is exactly what it sounds like: targeting a group of people based on their attendance at an event. It starts with hand-drawing one of our customizable geo-fences around a venue during a specified time frame, and those who enter the geo-fence and have location services enabled on their mobile device — which a plurality of mobile users do — become part of a new target audience. To recap: Step 1, identify event; Step 2, draw geo-fence; Step 3, capture and customize a dynamic audience; Step 4, deliver targeted mobile ads. It really is as simple as that.

But dig a little deeper and you’ll see a multitude of benefits our clients reap every day. Granularity? This has it — down to the quarter-hour level. Reusability? Yep — use custom audiences as many times as you like. Scalability? Of course — it’s our specialty! With our Event Targeting solution, audiences can be built, molded, and optimized in a way that best aligns with your business’s individual marketing efforts. Gone are the days when a major ad buy or TV commercial was prerequisite to reach major-event audiences; Event Targeting allows you to reach them in a new, meaningful, and efficient way.

Marketers who missed out on the college basketball tournament need not fret, however; opportunities to reach a similar demographic are right around the corner — like, for example, a college football game, which often draw crazed fans well into the tens of thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands. A local fan shop could geo-fence the stadium — or even the campus as a whole — to capture an audience of fans and students in the area, then deliver highly targeted ads to them at a later date. The university itself might even want to geo-fence the stadium to advertise tickets for other sports — messaging that’s almost certain to resonate, given that the audience has already shown an interest in supporting the school by attending games.

Professional basketball games — or better yet, playoff games — present another great opportunity for hoops-minded brands to capture an audience of b-ball lovers. Maybe the team is holding a basketball camp over the summer; why not geo-fence the arena to capture an audience of parents and families with a passion for the game? With the added data points of location and recency, our Event Targeting solution makes it easier to connect with your ideal consumer.

Sporting events are great targeting opportunities, but the benefits stretch across any industry, to any audience, at any time, anywhere. Concert venues, parade routes, fairgrounds, convention centers, theaters — virtually any event is a chance to custom-build the most relevant audience for your brand, as our recent South by Southwest Event Targeting study demonstrates.

With benefits like these, it’s no wonder such a significant part of our client base leverages Event Targeting as a central piece of their marketing initiatives. To see how we can put our Event Targeting solution to work for you, reach out to us at hi@simpli.fi.