Back to the Office, Back to IP Targeting
IP targeting is stepping back into the spotlight.
In a climate marked by uncertainty, structural overhauls, and evolving leadership, precision matters more than ever. Agencies and employees are navigating new norms, forcing marketers to rely on broader audience segmentation. IP targeting is once again a powerful tool for precision-driven digital campaigns.
IP Targeting vs. Geo-Fencing: Understanding the Difference
While both strategies involve location-based marketing, they serve distinct purposes:
IP Targeting
Focuses on serving ads to a specific IP address, ensuring precise one-to-one targeting at the household or business level.
Geo-Fencing
Creates a virtual boundary around a physical location, delivering ads to anyone within that radius—useful for event-based marketing but less precise than IP targeting.
These tactics are most effective when used in tandem with each other. For example, by geo-fencing a location (e.g., a federal agency, conference venue, or contractor-heavy building), you can collect device IDs and associated IP addresses of users within the perimeter. This allows you to continue targeting them with precision later via IP targeting—extending campaign impact beyond the initial location-based engagement.
The Resurgence of IP Targeting in Marketing
IP targeting allows you to deliver ads directly to your target audience. What does this mean? We can serve ads directly to accounts, agencies, institutions, and even households based on their unique IP addresses. Unlike cookie-based tracking, which is easily blocked or deleted, IP targeting offers a stable and deterministic way to reach the right audience. Now more than ever is the time for Marketers in the GovCon space to leverage this technology to engage with decision-makers at key business locations.
Marketers can refine their approach, ensuring that digital ads reach headquarters, procurement offices, and government agencies where purchasing decisions happen. IP targeting allows businesses to track ad engagement at the office level, offering a clearer picture of how campaigns influence workplace buying behavior.
Why ArtForm?
Even with federal firewalls and elusive IPs, creative solutions exist. ArtForm uses proprietary ad tech and techniques that can pierce these boundaries, ensuring your message arrives where it matters most. These tactics aren’t future-forward—they’re available now and wildly underutilized.
B2G Marketing: Reaching Government Decision-Makers
If you’re a Government Contractor looking to reach the decision makers on government contracts or upcoming opportunities, IP targeting provides a direct line to agency officials and procurement officers. Instead of relying on broad targeting methods, marketers can wrap serve ads directly to unique IPs, ensuring the reach to decision-makers involved in federal, state, or local purchasing.
Use Cases:
GovCon Marketing: Contractors can deliver targeted digital ads to key personnel at defense, intelligence, or civilian agencies, reinforcing messaging around compliance, security, and innovation.
Regulatory and Compliance Solutions: Companies offering cybersecurity, risk management, or compliance services can ensure their ads appear on devices within government networks.
Policy Advocacy & Public Affairs: Advocacy groups can target lawmakers and agency officials with issue-specific campaigns to influence policy decisions.
Event Targeting & Retargeting: Marketers can wrap major industry events—such as AFCEA, RSA Conference, or FedTalks—attended by decision-makers and key stakeholders, delivering ads during the event and continuing to retarget attendees afterward to maintain visibility and reinforce messaging.
Case Study: Reaching Elusive Federal Audiences
A leading data automation platform, trusted by federal leaders, struggled to break into highly specific and hard-to-reach federal markets. ArtForm deployed a cookie-less IP targeting strategy to precisely wrap key locations such as industry events, conferences, and even SCIF parking lots—areas known for a high concentration of their target audience. This hyper-focused approach drove visibility and qualified traffic to their product, generating over 150,000 impressions and 425 clicks within the first two months.
With a modest budget of just over $3,000, the campaign consistently reached an average of 1,000 high-value targets per day across three niche federal markets, resulting in a significant uptick in sales-ready leads.
How IP Targeting Works
IP targeting maps digital ads to a specific business or household IP address, ensuring messages reach the right audience without relying on cookies. By leveraging first-party data, third-party IP databases, and advanced matching techniques, companies can serve hyper-relevant ads to prospects actively engaging with their industry’s digital ecosystem. This approach is most effective when combined with geo-targeting — wrapping conference venues or office locations to capture IP addresses, allowing the ads to ‘follow’ individuals home.
Government Contracting & Public Sector Outreach
GovCon marketers can tailor ads to reach specific agencies, ensuring their messaging aligns with procurement officers and decision-makers actively involved in government spending.
How to Start Crafting Effective GovCon Messaging:
- Identify and segment specific agencies relevant to your offering
- Align ad campaigns with the priorities and language used by procurement officers and program managers.
- Replace vague or legacy terms like “consultant” with outcome-based language.
- Focus on tangible impact: e.g., “We implement X to save Y”
- Audit your current messaging for outdated buzzwords and update with mission-aligned terminology.
- Stay current with federal directives and language shifts (e.g., replace “Diversity and Inclusion” with “Skills-Based Hiring”).
- Avoid funding-sensitive terms (e.g., “climate consulting,” “AI education”) unless fully aligned with agency mission.
- Emphasize adaptability, efficiency, and measurable outcomes.
- Refine campaigns based on click-throughs, session duration, and conversion metrics tied to RFIs or contact form submissions.
- Regularly update creative assets to reflect evolving federal priorities and terminology.
Read ArtForm’s comprehensive blog Government Contractors: Adapting Your Messaging for the New Administration to dive deeper into GovCon messaging.
Example Use Cases
Scenario: An enterprise IT solutions provider wants to promote zero trust architecture and endpoint protection to federal agencies undergoing modernization. They deploy geo-fencing around key government buildings and cybersecurity events, capturing device IDs and IPs of attendees. Post-event, they switch to IP targeting, serving follow-up ads and solution briefs directly to agency offices—ensuring continuity and relevance in their outreach.
The Future of IP Targeting in a Hybrid World
While remote work isn’t disappearing, the return to office environments is reviving the impact of IP-based marketing. Companies that adapt their digital strategy to incorporate IP targeting will gain a competitive advantage in precision-driven marketing. By integrating IP targeting with broader account-based and contextual marketing strategies, businesses can maximize reach, engagement, and conversion potential in a shifting workplace landscape.
Marketers navigating the new era of workplace-based targeting should take full advantage of IP targeting’s resurgence. Whether you’re targeting government agencies, corporate buyers, or prospective students, precision advertising is back—and smarter than ever.
Ready to harness the power of IP targeting for your business? ArtForm will help you implement targeted campaigns that drive real results. Set up a call with us today or shoot us an email at hello@artformbsi.com and let’s strategize how IP targeting can elevate your marketing efforts.
