Jessica Malnik

Location Based Marketing: A Missed Opportunity?

By Jessica Malnik
3 comments
2 Min read
L

Now, I’m a bit of a skeptic when it comes to location based services. I’m still not entirely convinced why  I should be checking into places all the time, and what exactly is in it for me personally.

However, I see professionally countless opportunities for myself and other marketing pros to utilize the latest location based services. This became even more apparent when I listened to a talk from Mike Schneider (@SchneiderMike) at Social Fresh Tampa earlier this week.

Location based services offer a whole new level of marketing opportunities for businesses. As @SchneiderMike points out, marketers have always wanted to know where people are going. Now, they have unprecedented opportunity to find this out through Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVNGR, Facebook Places and even Yelp and Google Places/Latitude.

Every business should be monitoring these sites, and finding out who is checking in there. When you have a mayor at your location, that means they have taken the time to check in to your place multiple times. They are clearly a fan of your brand, and we as marketers need to smarten up and start engaging with them.

Also, do you have someone monitoring tips on Foursquare and Gowalla or Yelp reviews. This is a way to see what people enjoy about products/services as well as things to improve on.

So, what are you doing to encourage your customers to “check into” your establishment and/or leave tips/reviews?

Are you thinking beyond short-term contests and incentives?

How are you incorporating location-based services into your long-term social media strategy?

This is another opportunity to engage further and possibly develop brand evangelists. That’s the holy grail.

*To learn more about location-based marketing, check out @schneidermike blog as well as his new book: “Location-Based Marketing For Dummies.”

FacebookTwitter

About the author

Jessica Malnik
View all posts

3 comments

  • Hi Jessica,

    Great points above. There are two other things that businesses need to consider; how will they manage all of these location based services and how social media and location interact.

    Now that the customer can choose to interact with your business with a tool that suits them (Facebook or Twitter) (foursquare or Gowolla) (Facebook Places or Google Places) you don’t have the luxury of just saying well this is the tool that we use and this is how we will communicate with potential customers.

    As well, many businesses have already taken the steps in social with Facebook pages and Twitter streams but now of course the check-in services have social components and they can all cross post and interact making it a very unique marketing environment.

    We have been working on addressing the first item for businesses, how do you manage all of the services, by creating a tool called OfferedLocal which essentially brings together all of your social and check-in services and lets you create offers and promotions from one screen and then distribute them across all of your social and location based channels.

    This means that you can login once to do your marketing tasks and then bring in your analytics to once compiled view. In order for businesses to really embrace the location based marketing idea it has to be easier than it is today to manage and that is where we are headed.

    Thanks,

    Ed Loessi
    CMO
    OfferedLocal
    http://www.offeredlocal.com
    http://www.twitter.com/offeredlocal

    • You make some great points, Ed. As location services and social media sites become more engrained in our society, as marketers we need to listen an seek out where are customers are hanging out online then find a way to be a part of that conversation. That’s a more effective way of marketing as opposed to just shouting from old-school marketing methods, such as billboards and TV ads.

Jessica Malnik