One of the emerging marketing strategies in 2011 is the geo-location/geo-social marketing.  Geosocial Marketing is all where businesses can promote their services based on their specific location and friends can connect easily and efficiently. Different Location Based Services (LBS) provided by the different companies help to gear up the business by attracting new and previously unfound customers.

A report generated by the Pew Research Centre’s Internet & American Life found that 4% of online adults use the LBS provided by the Foursquare and Gowalla to remain connected with their friends and share their location. It leaves a proof that businesses are utilising the geo-marketing strategy to take their business to the next step.

Some more location based service provider include:   Brightkite, Loopt, Scvngr, FacebookPlaces, Yelp

Now foursquare being the more competitive approach, let’s look in more detail:

SO WHAT IS FOURSQUARE?

Foursquare is a service that allows registered users to connect and remain updated with their friends based on their location.  Another way people use foursquare is to “check-in” i.e. notifying foursquare about their whereabouts and their friends get updated about their recent location.   But this is only a part of it.  Foursquare have many more features.

Mayor

This reward is awarded to customers (exclusive of the employees who work there) who have checked in a particular venue over the last 60 days with the addition criteria of an image being uploaded in the profile photos.

Badges:

This reward is earned based on the ‘check-in’ habits of different venues. New badges are continuously earned from the different companies that foursquare partner with.

Use Foursquare for special offers:

This special offer is for new customers or the ‘special customers’ of your business.

SO HOW DOES FOURSQUARE HELP MY BUSINESS?

Always Reachable - Because foursquare is easily accessible on all leading mobile platforms including Android, iPhone and Blackberry, it helps the business to drive more traffic when users are out-and-about.

Foursquare for Business – For the business, foursquare offers a set of tools  not only to attract  new customers but also to retain the old ones. Foursquare ‘specials’ (which may be the mobile coupons, prizes, and a good discount on a product) is a great way to drive customers. The wide range of business specials (starting from Mayor Special, Frequency Special, Count Special, Custom Special, Venue Specials) also acts as a great incentive for users to visit your store.

Launch campaigns – Once a location is claimed for the business, one can launch campaigns to drive more customers to the business. In another way, foursquares’ marketing deals with larger companies like Bravo and Starbucks has helped to drive more traffic to these big brands. Also Foursquare’s campaign with McDonald’s, brings 33% more traffic to the company and leaves us a proof of the demand of the Foursqaure marketing application tool.

Visitor Stats – Foursquare helps to track the business performance based on a certain location. This is very handy for multiple branch businesses.  The venue stats report provide

• The recent visitors
• The most frequent visitors
• The time of day people people ‘check-in’
• Total number of unique visitors.

Reputation earning – When a person earns a reward (badge, mayor etc), the reviews they leave can help build up the business reputation.

Concept of Virtual Goods – For small companies with small assets, it’s not possible to have all products or all services available.  But with the concept of the virtual goods, the business might know what people are searching for and they can make such arrangements accordingly.

Thus, Foursquare’s biggest growth in 2010 with a total check-ins of 381,576,305 is indeed a great proof of its tailored success.  The success of geolocation marketing is increasingly immensely.

RECENT NEWS ABOUT GEOLOCATION MARKETING IN 2011

Recently, it was highlighted that Marks & Spencer (M&S) has signed-up to O2’s “You Are Here” location-based marketing service, which sends targeted text or MMS messages to O2 customers when they enter areas ‘owned’ by brands, retailers or services.

Google has  recently added new features to its ‘latitude mobile friendfinder’ service by introducing “check-in” features.  Google has renamed the rewards as Regular, VIP and Guru. Though Google latitude was launched 2 yrs ago, the proven results of its active usage  by 10 million consumers has lead Google to further develop the check-in functionality and have made it available presently on the updated Google Maps 5.1 for Android smartphones.

Indeed the competition of geolocation marketing is high. But apart from the beneficiary aspects of geolocation applications, there are a few disadvantages of such services:

• It’s great when the geolocation applications help you to spread your positive reputations through networking, negative reputations/reviews from people about your services won’t be such an easy reaction to embrace.
• From the user’s perspective, it’s not always good to share your location as someone with bad intentions could harm your business.  Eg, Jewellers.
• Too much advertising of the discount offers may put a negative impact on the customer,  e.g. repeated message over and over again.

In conclusion, with all the good and bad aspects of geolocation marketing and being highly competitive it’s a booming success mantra for all the businesses now and even in the near future.  Don’t miss out on this amazing marketing channel and if suitable for your business, we recommend using it to it’s full potential.