William Wilson: WiFi and Location Based Advertising with Bloom Intelligence & The Captiveyes Group

Are you in need of wifi marketing services?

William Wilson is the founder and CEO of Bloom Intelligence and the Captiveyes Group.

Bloom Intelligence has provided marketing strategies to companies since 2015.

Bloom Intelligence offers guest WiFi marketing & WiFi analytic tools for franchise restaurants, retail chains, and more to build customer databases, re-market to customers, and track online traction.

Captiveyes Group Inc has been operating location-based advertising since 2006.

Captiveyes offers Wi-Fi Hotspots, Indoor Digital Billboards, Campus Billboards, and more.

Learn more about Bloom Intelligence and the Captiveyes Group by listening to this episode of The Thoughtful Entrepreneur above and don’t forget to subscribe on  Apple Podcasts – Stitcher – Spotify –Google Play –Castbox – TuneIn – RSS.

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0:00
Welcome to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. I'm Josh Elledge, founder and CEO of UpMyInfluence.com. We turn entrepreneurs into media celebrities, grow their authority, and help them build partnerships with top influencers. We believe that every person has a unique message that can positively impact the world. stick around to the end of the show, where I'll reveal how you can be our next guest on one of the fastest growing daily inspiration podcasts on the planet in 15 to 20 minutes. Let's go. Alright, Will Wilson, you are the founder and CEO of Bloom Intelligence and the Captiveyes Group. Now you do some pretty cool stuff. And we were talking before the interview here. And so there's a couple of things that you do and then I'll just kind of to kind of explain this, but number one is you provide on campus advertising, so access to a population that pretty valuable, and you would think that would be kind of difficult to reach in terms of on campus, you don't normally think that you can run billboards on a college campus, but you've figured out some ways to do that. So that's number one, we're gonna talk about that. And number two, is that you work with businesses, and you provide WiFi marketing and analytics tools. So and I'll have you explain a little bit about this. But basically, if a restaurant chain, for example, wants to offer free WiFi, well, they could actually do things a little bit more intelligently than just setting up a router and you know, writing the password on the wall, and just who knows what people are looking at, you've actually found some better ways that they can monetize that maybe learn a little bit more about their customers and become make made that much more of a profitable venture to be able to offer that WiFi so it will if you wouldn't mind like I'd love to start with talk about because that's the first. So I believe that's the first company, you started to be able to advertise in what feels like closed environments.

2:11
Yep. So as kind of a background of my story, I started with my partner, Captiveyes Group back in 2006. And it was actually at a my master's program at Florida State University for integrated marketing. And as a backstory of everything that I've ever built. I've always built it based upon something that I needed. So what happened? I was working my way through college as a bartender, and every time I was going through that process, the management team would always want me to become management and I was always pushing back against it, because why would I want to get paid less right through that process? But then she came to a solution and I basically said, I'm still bartender, I'll stop barking. You can pay me less as a manager, but you need to give me the rights to throw events at your If it's a new event, I would take the entire door and I would take a percentage of the bar plus i would pay for that event. So it would be zero out of your pocket. Now if it was an existing event, I would just take the door and I paid for the event. So what I was doing at that point is I would go out and I would sell sponsorships to cover the cost of that event. And part of the sponsorships was really a marketing package I would put together when I was on radio, TV and one things I was doing as I was creating TV commercials, then I would put those TV commercials up on the screens before the these events for like two months, I started finding out my top level sponsors I was spending $3,000 a pop, just really wanted to be up on the screens at those locations before that. And put this in perspective. I wasn't doing badly in college, I was doing very well for myself in college and in fact, I could have stayed there, but what I'm what I was doing, but so through the process, I was like you know what, why don't I just make a couple extra thousand dollars and put them up there and just do that every month. But nothing was thinking small. And I decided, you know what I going to put my own screens at these locations, create a network of the screens. And so advertising cross it. And that's how capitalized group or capitalized advertising was launched, that evolved over time to where we now expand it and, you know, WiFi, which I'll cheat a little bit how that happened. Parking Garage billboards, directional signage, map signage on these campuses will have long term deals with these campuses to monetize assets or platforms that we can sell advertising across to really targeted and that group. So the transition to how bloom intelligence came about was a very similar process is advertising is really about reach frequency, the ability to target who you're targeting and engagement. And I needed a way to measure that. And I was looking for ways because you know, who are the people are that are at these locations that are at on campus or at this gym or at this restaurant? How often are they coming there? How long are they staying? How long are they looking at these ads? Well, the thing that I discovered is WiFi gave me the ability to capture a lot of that information. And at first, I was thinking, you know, let me go ahead and build out a solution for them that I provide to them. That's a value and exchange for me doing that they can pay me a small amount, and I can sell advertising underneath it. Now, we still have that going on today within our capitalized advertising. But as we started growing that business, and we start getting through, like, say why we started realizing a lot of people that we are targeting these restaurant groups, they really want a platform itself, but they didn't want the advertising from outside partners underneath it. So that's when you know not to create brand confusion. We signed off home intelligence, roughly. I mean, we've been building the product for over six or seven years. But we get on and off and you know, only within the last two to three years. And since that time, we've scaled to being a international National Business. Implement intelligent um, that's kind of my journey and to jump into what no makalah is?

6:07
Yeah. So let me ask you specifically. And so what we're talking about is your your place of business you offer Wi Fi. And beyond just being able to there's a couple of opportunities here. Number one, obviously, when I say your business owner, you got a brick and mortar business, you put up free WiFi, connect to the WiFi, you're going to see an ad when you connect. So there's an there's inventory there to monetize in and hopefully offset. Yeah, offset the cost of offering the WiFi. And then you also so a business can also take a look at WiFi metrics and some analytics behind that. And so, as a consumer guy, I'm particularly interested in that. Because, you know, I you know, I was just for example, I was in Publix yesterday using Publix as WiFi and meanwhile I'm looking up some things on Amazon when I'm shopping and you know, they probably are aware of There's some activity going on. And that's probably helpful for them to know. Yes, of course.

7:05
Well, so this is this is the beauty of today's world and the transition of technology in a lot of different ways as long as you fault specific rules, I would say is, this is the analogy I like to give about intelligence is think about what online companies do digital marketers do. They understand when someone comes to their website, they understand what they're clicking on what content they're interacting with, ultimately, what they're purchasing. And they're going to need to log in, so they capture your digital profile. So they're taking all this behavior data that they're collecting around you. You're building a profile of not only that behavior data by exactly who you are names, email addresses, phone numbers, demographics, that goes birthday, right. And then they're using all this data to provide key performance indicators like Google Analytics for for the website to understand how do you optimize the funnel, and then they're also remarketing and personalizing your experience, right? that exact same process we do in physical location. So if you think about it, it kind of works in three steps is someone walks into a location, what most people don't understand is we're measuring customer behavior behavior, whether it's someone logs into WiFi or not. We start collecting anomalous data at this point. So Josh, I know is you. But what I would know is that your devices there, and how often they come back, and how long is days and a lot more advanced algorithms that we provide key performance indicators around these businesses that they can see in their dashboard, which is home location analytics, or presence analytics. Now, at some point, you go to log into Wi Fi, right. And at that point, that you see a customized landing page that's professionally designed for you. But ultimately, this is where customer ops in and we're able to capture their either their entire digo profile all at once or over time, right. And then we're combining this with other sources of data, whether it's online data, social media data, reporting on point of sales data now and creating these deeper profiles, then that they're able to start able to remark Your customers based upon behavior. So once someone logs into your Wi Fi once, they never have to log back in and run remarketing based upon their behavior because we know you because at that point, your device information is now tied to your digital profile once you opted in, and now we just have remarketing views, surveys, messages, or offers, and we can track everything down to the tangible ROI of every transaction. So we're taking the digital marketing understanding that people understood online, and now we're overlaying it to the physical location, giving those businesses the same ability.

9:32
Does that make sense? Yeah, so let's talk about specifically like what you could do with that data as a business owner. So let's say I'm BurgerFi, and I okay, so clearly, someone's hop back on my WiFi, and they're here pretty much every few days. What should I do with that information?

9:49
So there's a lot of different things that you want to do with that information, right? You want to identify who your loyal customers are, and if you want to start rewarding them based upon their loyalty, or more important You know, if you start defining, for example, one of the things we do is we measure churn for physical locations, which are the, your audience doesn't know what churn is. It's the basic amount of customers you're gaining or losing over a period. Right? Yeah, employee attrition, customer attrition is customer loss, right? So we rent running a machine learning algorithm that measures everyone's frequency distribution and starts predicting their next visit. And where they go outside of their normal distribution patterns were either hitting on or marketing was low, medium, high, or they they have turned, they're not coming back. Now set up, we can set up automated marketing campaigns that target the people that are likely to return based upon our algorithm. And what we're seeing is we're saving up to 38% of the customers that we target that have churn meaning they're not coming back. And from a marketers perspective, it's much cheaper to save an existing customer. Right?

10:57
Yeah, you know, getting them in the door for the first time is like, you know, it's usually very expensive in order to get that, but if you can, you know, get people to come back, you know, again, we want that that heavy users like coming back over and over and over again and you know, hopefully we can get them you know, if they're a fan and they liked the experience would be really great if we could get them sharing their experience, you know, posting on social media about how much they love birder phi or world of beer or, you know, one of your other I'm kind of hand picking some of your clients and work with right now.

11:33
Yeah, and that's great. So think about it, even in terms of like, you, you leave a location you can set up upon actually trigger imagine, there's two different things. Let's, let's talk about a scenario, right, is you notice that you can put a deal that says, you know, is normal cover frequency is, let's say 1.6 times a month, right? That's your average customer frequency. And you were like, wow, I really wanted people to start coming two times a month. And so what you can do is Soon as they leave, and unless you can send it to be like hours or days afterward, you can send them an offer and say, Hey, come back within two weeks and receive this. So then you're using this offer to shape customer behavior to increase their frequency.

12:15
Band revenue.

12:16
Right? Right. So when someone registers to use the the the WiFi, they're sharing an email address, is that right?

12:23
More than emails, emails, phone numbers for a

12:26
phone number? Sure they can text an offer,

12:29
if that's what they wanted to do. Yes. But yes, and we're verifying those emails so they're real emails. So that's one of the another benefit that we're doing is we're building our customers databases, seven to 15 times faster than they ever could do before compared to the old Fishman technique where they, you know, name in here, let me manually enter this. Now we're doing we're building entire customer profiles. Yeah, madelene passively and we're building a database and hundreds and thousands for these. These multi unit restaurants are these physical locations. And it's clean customer data. So you actually know who your customers are 95% of large operating physical locations, have no idea who the real customer base is, I mean, just based on small sample size data, or the large sample size data, and that's what we can bring to the table on that one side. On the other side of it, let's imagine you did when someone leaves a location, you want to send them a survey, and you want to say, how was your experience today? Right? So now you can start understanding, for example, how many people if they're having a good experience, or they're not having a good experience, but more importantly, if someone had a bad experience, you can react to it in real time. Or you can set up automatic feedback loops that say, Okay, if someone gives me a star rating, let's say four stars are above, then let me go ahead and ask them to rate you on Google or TripAdvisor, etc. And we give them the link to go out there and build a do that. Yeah, what are you doing, you're putting good positive ratings out there that are driving people into your Your business or more or less new business, right? Or if it's a negative rating, let's go ahead and say, We're sorry about your bad experience today. Let's, you know, here's a free cookie on us and give us another try to come back into location and give you another try. And at that point, after they leave, we can set up a follow up survey and see if that experience has improved or not. So really getting this automatic feedback loop for you. That's just like another mechanism. We also integrate with online advertising too. So you can set up remarketing campaigns, anyone that's going to be here, platform, get Facebook or Google or LinkedIn or even create lookalike audiences, which is pretty if your audience are not sure what look like is that just targeting people that are similar to the people that went through our WiFi, so that's new business. So that's where it's interesting.

14:50
And for the person who's listening to us, and we're all consumers as well. And you might be thinking, gosh, this is a little bit big brother is it I think we all What's so when you sign in, there's an option or sometimes it's a checkmark, you don't have to connect to the WiFi. But generally, you want to be very upfront is like listen, can we send you promotional offers? Yeah, you know, I want to you don't want to fool anybody or anything, but it's pretty clear to the consumer and I love getting coupons. You know, and so, you know, I get them via text I sighs silence and notifications, I don't want to get, you know, you know, alerts and stuff like that, but I don't mind going into that text account or my email box and saying, Hey, I'll take a coupon from subway or a burger fire, whatever it might be. And, you know, I don't mind if they're watching my behavior, and if they want to incentivize me to come into the door, go ahead, send me your best offer. You know, I'll let you know based on you know, my appetite whether or not that was a good fit.

15:56
Yeah, I need to track it back in the business as she can track this back to tangible on why someone walking back into location. And actually if they put in a per person average ROI or that or they integrated the point of sales, actual transactional value. So like, it's closing that gap in that. And I think in terms of customer privacy, and this is very important subject customer privacy is one level, it's all anonymous information, meaning I have no idea who you are. This is just top line stats around, you know how often you come back or not, you aggregate of your customer base in advance out of control time by hour, which is actually measuring of anyone that comes in at a specific hour, how long are they normally staying at your location to pay maybe compared to your normal table turn time? That's all nominees, then you opt in at any point, you can always opt out. Right? So it's making sure that we follow that process and give customers the ability to understand what's happening with their data, but it's like anything else. Have you stopped going to Amazon and shopping on Amazon,

16:55
not ever going to do I can't see myself ever doing that.

17:00
Do you like that they send you personalized offers?

17:02
You and of course, because I'll take advantage of them if, if it doesn't just hit delete, and say no, not for me, if you're taking I

17:10
agree, you're taking a cost center that was a traditional cost center that you had to set up this WiFi, you got zero, anything from it, and we actually turn it into a revenue center free.

17:20
You know it? And my argument from a you know, is because I'm a consumer expert, and had been for 12 years. And my argument is, is that do you want irrelevant offers? Or do you want relevant offers? And if a business doesn't know who you are, then they're just going to send you stuff for like, you know, they're going to send you offers for boys pads or something as I have no need for that. Why are you Why are you wasting my time with that kind of messaging. Instead, you know, I got a new puppy and I want you to know that because I really want special offers, or I want to learn about new products and services that I need. So I think from a consumer standpoint, I i'm in favor of, you know, a personalized experience. And I don't mind me personally, I know some other people would argue, but I don't mind sharing that information, because I want you to work with me, Mr. business owner, Mrs. business owner, to give me what I'm looking for. And you could tell based on whether I did it or not that that was a good fit for me.

18:26
Yes, sir. Absolutely. And how do you create an automated way to do that? And when you when you start thinking about the other thing is how do I clean that? How am I verifying this information? How I mean, that's where if you're providing customer value, they don't mind giving you this clean data, because they want the value that you're providing. And that's a big thing for people in any business to think about when they're operating is what value am I actually creating here? For my customers as as I set these systems up? Can I go ahead? Is this scalable, right, is it something that I can set in play and it worked for me as I go on Then we're going to see and we're the real exciting stuff in my mind is you're getting to the point where physical locations are able to pull data from every area that they possibly have a customer touch point, they can aggregate, aggregate it, analyze it, use that data to create a better customer experience for their customers, which creates expansion revenue. I love it. It really the worlds are converging and how we work. Yeah, always be customer value driven. Right? I love about it.

19:30
Awesome. So, Will wilson, you are the founder and CEO of- the founder and CEO of the Captiveyes Group. And that is on the web at captiv. It actually looks like captive, yes, but its captiv. You share the E between the two words. So it's Captiveyes.com. And then as well, you're the founder and CEO of Bloom Intelligence and that's on the web at bloomintelligence.com. You've got some great case studies. You've got a discussion. There's a report right here discover the ROI of collecting customer profiles. So if you've enjoyed the person who's watching this conversation or listening this conversation, enjoyed some of the content that we're talking about. Then it looks like you have a great report there that people can learn a lot more about this so well, you're just down the road over in St. Pete, thank you so much for joining us.

20:21
Thank you, Josh. I appreciate everything and thank you to your audience.

20:25
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