Despite Naysayers, I Still Encourage Location Based Services for Businesses | ad-ition digital strategies that work
With location based services (LBS) and couponing being as popular as they are, you are undoubtedly going to come across a slew of stats that either speak their praise or demise. So seeing a post yesterday from the Business Insider, with a title that would lead a reader to believe that location based services provide no value to business owners was not surprising, but it was disappointing. In fact, BI was referencing a set of data released by Fast Company that says they’ve seen Applied Predictive Technologies data and the revenue lift seen by business owners, participating in location based services, amounts to only 2%. Publishing such findings that lead to thoughts either far left or right is concerning, unless we have all of the facts. No where do we see how long the test data was collected, the proprietor types and verticals (were they fabric stores or restaurants), and relation to city centre geography. All this to say to our business owner friends, don’t let things like this sway you from getting involved with different types of user engagement, especially mobile engagement, which is really what your location bases services are set up to be. Instead, let’s talk about how a business owner can make services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, and Facebook Places (my least favourite of the three), work for them.
Waiting until you crown me to talk to me: many benefits to ‘checking in’ are not recognized until you become mayor of a location and depending on the foot traffic into some of these locations, that could take a mighty long time. So, what does this mean for lowly me who only gets to the location once a week? It means the business may never treat me as a special Foursquare customer. My suggestion, instead of waiting until someone becomes mayor to show them some love, start looking at what can be done for folks who just plainly check in. Foursquare allows business owners to choose from a bunch of different offering types and some even promote group checkins and smell a lot like a group buying service. Regardless, allowing more of your check-ins to participate with you on location based services will increase your resulting revenues.
Analytics: if you utilise Foursquare as a business, be sure to review your checkin analytics. Take a look at time of day trends and even activity on days when you’ve changed offerings and promoted them. All of these elements will give you insight on as to what is or isn’t working so well and prompting action from you to either repeat the good ideas or tweak the bad. I think some believe that participating in location based services type programs means it will work right out of the box, and that’s not always true. Think of it as you would merchandising. That top of the line salad spinner to brought in-store in December doesn’t seem to be doing well, but you remember stocking it last May and moving it like hot-cakes, May to August. You now recognize that the salad spinner works spring/summer, but not fall/winter and as a result, will elect to stock only a few in the winter but a whole bunch in warmer weather. We can go on with examples, such as when store owners move items from the back of the store to the front, or even the changes made to staffing after looking at walk in traffic over the past few weeks. It is that forecasting and planning approach that you need to apply to your location based services analytics, in order to optimize your experience.
Old and dated things get moldy: meaning, keep your offerings fresh and timely. Play on seasonality or even special holidays. Take a page out of Foursquare’s book – they encourage users to check in on certain holiday’s to gain additional points for that week. The fresher the concept, the more interest you will get.
Promote it: let your users or walkers by of your location know that you are active on location based services and would love to engage with them there too! If you don’t let them know of your fab steps to mobile engagement, they’ll may never participate with you and your LBS store front.
It’s still new: Aside from Foursquare and to some extent Gowalla (especially their events handling), location based services groups are still new. For as much discussion and mind share we give to Facebook Places, it is still in beta and not available in many areas and some of the geo-targeting advertising one would think you’d be able to do with Facebook Places, still doesn’t exist. So those of you looking to Places to give you a major lift, because of the ‘Facebook’ brand, your a bit ahead of your time.
In no way should businesses be encouraged to turn away from utilizing location bases services. It’s a great way to reward your loyal, new, group and or even fair-weather customers who return from time to time. Mostly, it gives you another way to engage, in a smart way, with customers using mobile methodology.
Related Posts
Leave A Response
