Location Based Marketing Is Helping Drive Repeat Customers

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Location Based Marketing Is Helping Drive Repeat Customers

Repeat customers. Everyone wants them yet few want to take the steps necessary to get them. The location based marketing continues to pick up momentum, and it’s primarily due to the 10 million+ users within Foursquare who are driving the influence. (Young, active males who influence their peers)

It starts with earning a few badges, then you get hooked on the points, add a few more badges – then it hits you: You realize that people are leaving helpful tips, to-do’s and recommendations. Then, you become Mayor of a location where you can actually get a discount or a reward. Even worse, you lose your Mayorship. Now you MUST get it back.

You just became a repeat customer. And that business loves you.

Check out how other businesses are using location based marketing to drive repeat customers in this NY Times article.

How are you using it? (Stay tuned for more details about how this entire movement will shift from active to passive and even incorporate mobile pay wallets!)

What’s On Your Foursquare Radar?

Location’s transition to passive activities is starting much sooner than many expected.

The newest updates now allow you to enable Foursuare’s Radar functionality. Items that you’ve deemed interesting, places you visited or even places that are heating up with activity can now alert you. Keep in mind, these are items that are of interest to you – you determine the notification received.

Compare Your Website Metrics vs. Google’s Global Analytics

Excellent infographic from KISS Metrics showing global Google analytics metrics and usage trends. Compare your website metrics to these statistics – how does your site measure up? Click to view full size.

Facebook Places Can’t Find It’s Place

The location based marketing services landscape just shifted. Heavily.

Facebook Places, their answer to the check-in game, is shutting down. Not a major shocker. Sure, there was activity, relegated mostly to larger metropolitan areas. I used it two times – once at a restaurant to show my friends how it worked and once at a concert with my wife. No rewards, no tips, no to-do’s. Not even a goofy badge to show off.

Businesses failed to promote the check-in activity, presumably from a lack of support or a defined benefit. I tried to find the opportunity to leverage Facebook Places for Auction Direct, but it didn’t make sense. A lack of purpose, rewards and trust made it difficult for anyone to make checking-in within Facebook a consistent activity. Most users probably won’t even notice the service isn’t even available once shut down.

Killing off Facebook’s Places leaves me thinking about three items:

Great opportunity for Foursquare to pick up additional activity from Places users
New opportunities for niche check-in platforms such as GetGlue
Niche location and photo-sharing applications will have had a longer life than Places, such a CarZar. And possibly even more users, such as Foodspotting.

Will you miss Facebook Places?

Update: Ok, so location as a feature hasn’t been shut off 100%. It just won’t function as it did before – completely pointless. The mobile app hasn’t been updated yet, but the web version has. Still pointless to me, yet shows Facebook is looking to change how location based services fit into their platform. Not quite sure what that change will look like seeing that Facebook Deals has been axed as well. Stay tuned.

Checking In! FourSquare and Foot-Traffic

Attract new customers, create loyalty and track foot traffic

Foursquare and other Location-Based Services are increasingly helping dealerships attract new customers, create loyalty, and track ever-elusive showroom foot traffic. Fun and free, these tools are growing rapidly in popularity among individuals and businesses: Overall awareness of location-based services has reached 56% of US-based cell phone users, and 39% of them currently use at least one location-based application (eMarketer study Feb. 2011).

What’s Foursquare All About?

Individuals use apps such as Foursquare to find friends, check out tips from other users and receive rewards from the different places they visit. Rewards range from vendor deals and discounts to unlocking badges, becoming the “Mayor” of a venue and earning points:

Badges: Users unlock badges for checking into specific locations or doing specific activities. Is this virtual “reward” corny? Yes. Is it effective? Very. Foursquare users cherish their accomplishments and flaunt them proudly.
Mayorships: The person who checks-in to a location the most over a 60-day period becomes its “mayor”.
Points: Every check-in earns you more points–another game element which helps foster the competitive nature of the application.

How to Get Your Dealership On Foursquare

Foursquare currently has ten million registered users checking-in to venues at a rate of one per second, activity that presents several unique opportunities for dealerships to connect with, engage and retain customers. Four simple steps make this possible:

Register. If not signed up already, do so here: http://Join.4sq.com/emiltsch
Claim your venue: Once logged in to Foursquare, search for your dealership by name and select “claim your venue.” Add your dealer’s name, keywords, address, URL, categories and tags. Be sure to add a complete description. TIP: Individuals have profiles; businesses have venues. Don’t make an individual profile for your dealership.
Create your specials: Make a special for your venue. These can be Mayor specials, for a visitor’s 1st check-in or after multiple check-ins–a free oil change on your 1st check-in, for example.
Monitor your venue: Foursquare provides a nice set of free analytics tools to track your visitor’s check-ins: day and time, demographics, frequency, etc.

You can even measure Social Reach by the percentage of users sharing check-in activity on Facebook and Twitter. TIP: Hang window clings & print fliers of your specials to share with employees and your visitors to help spread the word. Foursquare provides these resources on their website.

Capturing the Benefits

When Foursquare users check-in to venues, notifications of nearby specials are displayed within the app. Individuals can also add tips and to-do’s left by other users to their profiles, which means activity involving your dealership can extend to an online audience far beyond your core users. These benefits will only continue to expand as smartphone adoption continues to grow and more consumers will experiment with geo-location applications.

So, where are your customers checking-in?

Original post appeared on the Dealer.com Newsletter

Brewski Me Review: Location Based Drinking App Gets 2 Mugs Up!

Brewski Me is now available in iTunes and a much deserved congratulations is in order for it’s developers and founders: Adam Weeks & Brian Knowles from AppsVersusRobots LLC.

They used a simple formula that’s become popular around specific activities and interests. Their tag line says it all: Don’t drink alone. Drink with friends.

Simple works well here:

Share the beer you’re drinking with your friends
Discover new beers
Share your location where you’re drinking
Discover new places

The launch and sign-up screens are simple to use and make no mistake of letting you know this is about one thing: you and your beer. Very nice touch adding the Glossary page upon registering with the app. A simple, hierarchical list of the Brewski Me lexicon so you can hit the ground running with the app’s functionality.

Once you’re logged in, you’ll be familiar with the activity stream we’re all comfortable with seeing in other LBS & activity based apps. You’ll see your last drink and your friend’s activities. Additional on screen notifications show when users unlocked awards and who left a review. (Star ratings and/or written reviews)

Sharing a drink:

Hit the central bottle cap labeled “Drink”
Enter the beer’s name
Or choose from your favorites, the queue or the cellar
You can even add a beer if it’s not included in their database

Once the beer is selected, you can share where you’re enjoying that tall cool one and whether it’s a can, bottle or draft. Brewski Me uses Gowalla’s location API to ping your location, but doesn’t integrate with other location based applications such as Foursquare. Add more info to the “Drink Notes” tab and choose additional networks to share this activity. (Twitter & Facebook) Another nice touch is the quick click privacy selection. Smart within an app sharing this type of activity.

I’m not aware of any exclusive relationships or marketing initiatives with brands, breweries or bars – yet. Plenty of opportunities for each segment to extend their brand, generate buzz within their fan base and create some really unique promotional activity.

Overall, Brewski Me is well thought out, runs smoothly and has a beautifully designed interface with easy to use controls.

Cheers!

Download Brewski Me

Brewski Me was designed by: Rocksauce Studios

6 Twitter Strategies You Can Really Use

People still debate the issue whether or not twitter is a channel that should be utilized for any purpose other than sharing nonsensical information.

Still have your doubts? Check out this great infographic from Olgilvy PR Wordwide. This outlines six strategic approaches by sharing the basic principles with regards to who you follow, what you should create and how you should engage. Click image to expand.

How are you using twitter now?

Foursquare Switches To Follower-Following Model

Big step forward by Foursquare by changing from a “friends” model to allowing users to follow & have followers. (of their profile)

This is another move towards creating a new layer of influencers within Foursquare based on their activity levels including total number of check-ins, badges, Mayorships, etc.

Could be viewed as another step in the broader acceptance of individual influence score. (EX: Klout.)

Read more from the smart people at Hubspot below…

Amplify’d from blog.hubspot.com

Foursquare Now Distinguishes Between Friends and Followers

See more at blog.hubspot.com

See this Amp at http://amplify.com/u/bs8lu

7 Social Marketing Channels With The Highest ROI

Great article from Marketing Profs. shows the seven social marketing channels & activities with the highest ROI:

Ratings & Reviews
Your Company/Brand Community
Your Company/Brand Blog
Participate in Industry Blog/Forum
Facebook
LinkedIn
Twitter

Also interesting to note: The high percentage of CMO’s responding that they either don’t know or have zero ROI for their activities. Tracking and listening to activities still seems to be lacking.

What’s working for you?

10 Reasons Why People Use Location Based Applications

Another interesting look into the behaviors of location based marketing application users was released in a recent study by Lightspeed Research.

Their research shows that consumers are still slow to respond to Location Based Marketing efforts. I agree with this statement – but it helps paint a picture of the segment when you look at the possible reasons why as well.

First, it’s not a mainstream activity yet. The mass media hasn’t jumped all over this activity yet. Think twitter even 2 years ago. The masses didn’t know about it; Twitter wasn’t mentioned on the news, in sitcoms and certainly wasn’t mentioned in movies.

Second, we still haven’t hit 50% penetration of the US cell phone users on smart phones with GPS functionality. Once this happens, LBS usage should increase.

Third, businesses still haven’t adopted LBS as a strategy. Marketing departments and creative agencies are just starting to see the opportunities when adding this activity layer to the marketing communications mix.

Thoughts?

What events do you see happening to help drive this change even further? Or less?

Amplify’d from cellular-news.com