Location based Marketing – What’s the big deal

With the explosion of smart phones over the Christmas period and indeed over the last 12 months a new style of marketing has been born and is starting to evolve. The increase of handsets now with built in GPS, allowing users to check in, on the move, and share their locations with friends and other users is on the increase. Blackberry is now the biggest smartphone vendor in the UK with a whooping 500,000 handsets sold in December 2010 alone. Recent research carried out by GfK (Marketing Weekly, December 2010) has shown that Blackberry now have 28% market share across all smartphones in the UK with a 51% pre-pay market share

Location based services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, and Brightkite have been around the neighbourhood for some time now, while Facebook has recently entered the location based arena with its Facebook Places.  Recently on a first trip to a major city, I was instantly able to see the benefits of using the Foursquare app to see what was around my current location.  When I needed a place to eat, the app revealed a number of choices, as well as review tips from previous customers of the establishments, special offers to entice me in and a map to find just what street the premises was on – very handy indeed.

For businesses seeking to reach people on the move, location based marketing offers a whole new opportunity, engaging their customers while simultaneously benefitting them via their smartphone.

Lets look a little further.   A local coffee shop decides to use Foursquare.  So they sign up and start connecting with people.  Pretty quickly this will start to give the vendor of the coffee shop some useful insights into people in the area whom he or she may be connected to – it could reveal understanding of:

• What their connections prefer in the area
• What their connections like to eat or drink
• How frequently they are visiting other coffee shops in the area
• What’s their reason for visit? i.e for a meeting, lunch date, meet with friends, or a coffee and go

Now if I was a coffee shop owner I would find the above data particularly interesting in helping to develop a strategy targetting these potential customers.  But then just how as a business could I benefit from using a service such as Foursquare?  Well it’s quite simple.  We have already seen from the above points the sort of information you can find out by location based services.  For the business it opens up a whole new opportunity to market products and services. Foursquare for instance  can offer a special offer and if the phone user is close to your coffee shop a “special offer tab” will show up.   if the user clicks on it then your offer will be available, what’s best of all is it’s free to do.  This is just the beginning and you can take it further for example “The Mayor Special” the mayor gets one free drink every day of his or her reign or become the mayor and receive a free coffee.  These are of course just a few of the features that businesses can use to target customers, encourage repeat business and develop loyalty.  Another big benefit and again free is the SEO with Foursquare.  Venue pages are displayed in search results featuring your business name, address and telephone.

In its first year Foursquare had over 600,000 active users, 16 million check in’s with an impressive 1.4 million venues listed this figure for users as of Jan 2011 has now grown to staggering 6 million the growth is impressive.
Location based services such as Foursquare offer small businesses the opportunity to target and market customers in a different way, reaching them on the move and via their smartphone.  As growth of smartphones continues to rise there is no doubt that location based marketing will become a key component in the marketing mix as a component which should not be overlooked and if used effectively can deliver very promising results and insights to your customers.

We’d love to help your business embrace location based marketing – lets grab a coffee  and show you how we can help