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Aaron Strout

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10 Keys to a Good Location Based Marketing Campaign

June 14, 2011 By Aaron Strout 9 Comments

Originally posted on my work blog at WCGWorld.com on April 7, 2011

If you aren’t familiar with location based services, some of the top providers are foursquare, Gowalla, Yelp, Facebook Places, Whrrl and SCVNGR. These services help companies engage with their customers and create loyalty 2.0 programs by exchanging value (offers, coupons, badges, mayorships) for tips, check-ins and spreading the word. In this particular post, I’m going to share 10 basic tips that any company can use to help build a successful location based marketing program:

  1. Be sure to claim your location across each of the top 5-6 location based providers, even if you don’t plan on regularly monitoring/engaging in all of them.
  2. Pick 1-2 services to use (hint: if you’re in the travel and entertainment industry, Gowalla is a great choice). One way to decide which service(s) are right for you is to see how active your customers are across each service.
  3. Find out who your influencers are (the mayor, ambassador or the person at the top of your leader board is usually a good place to start) and get to know them. Heck, invite them in for coffee, lunch, a wine tasting.
  4. Set some goals. Are looking to drive foot traffic? Loyalty? Sales? Engagement? Think about how to measure this.
  5. Pick a great offer. Note that “great” doesn’t equal “expensive.” Sometimes, a sign in your store/venue honoring the “mayor” might be enough. My co-author, Mike Schneider, and I have what we call the “Ben & Jerry’s Rule” named after one of the first successful campaigns ever to roll out on foursquare. They offered 3 scoops of ice cream for $3 for everyone that checked in (cost for 3 scoops is normally $5.50). And even better, the mayor got a free extra scoop.
  6. Measure, refine and optimize.
  7. Don’t be afraid to leverage the “game dynamics” of some of these platforms as appropriate. For instance, on SCVNGR, you might give extra points for a picture with the store manager. Or if you sell coffee, a bonus for the best drink recommendation.
  8. Remember to let people know about your program by putting up signs, telling them in your newsletter, including a mention on your “on hold” music, etc.
  9. Operationalize, operationalize, operationalize. This means that if you are going to run a location based marketing campaign, train your employees. Train yourself. And make sure you have whatever it is that you’re promising. Not operationalizing is where many companies fall down.
  10. If you are tech savvy (or have some tech savvy developers), try experimenting with some of the APIs these location based platform providers make available for free. You can jazz up your website or your mobile app.

Has your company launched a location based marketing campaign? If so, tell us about it in the comments below.

Quick-n-dirty Podcast Recap 17: Yelp-ing it Up

October 2, 2009 By Aaron Strout 1 Comment

I have a rule with e-mail. It’s called the 2 minute/2 week rule. You can probably guess what the rule is but if not, it means that I try and respond to most e-mails within 2 minutes. The reason being, if I don’t get to it in 2 minutes, it usually sits in my inbox until I’m on a plane so you get a response 2 weeks later.

The reason I bring my “rule” up is that I’m taking that approach with today’s Quick-n-Dirty podcast wrap up. I’m hustling a little bit because I have to leave in 45 minutes to pick friends up at the airport. We’re going to the Austin City Limits music festival this weekend so if I don’t do this now, you won’t get the recap until Monday or Tuesday of next week.

With that as a caveat [ahem, excuse] for my pithiness, onto to the deets. Oh, remember that you can always download these podcasts on iTunes, listen to show archives here or find recaps of past episodes on this blog and co-host, Jennifer Leggio’s Feeds blog on ZDNet focused on social business.

Highlights from this week’s show:

  • Featured Social Network: Gowalla. The easy way to describe it is that it’s a FourSquare knock off but don’t just take my word for it. TechCrunch did a good comparison of Gowalla and FourSquare if you’re looking for a more detailed description of each. To that end, Gowalla does have some cool additional features like recommended user generated walking tours. Jennifer isn’t a fan, especially because of it’s wonky GPS capabilities. The jury is still out with me.
  • Special Guest: Vince Solitto, VP of Communications, Yelp. Okay, I feel a little bit bad because Jennifer and I definitely put Vince on the “Budweister hot seat” with some of our questions. Given Vince’s background in politics, he seemed to handle the pressure without any problem. The one big takeaway that I didn’t realize about Yelp is that only a third of their reviews/ratings are for restaurants. The rest are for services — similar to Angie’s List — think dentists, doctors and daycare. Who knew?
  • Featured Tweeter: Simon Mainwaring. I’ve recently put Simon in my “Trust Tree” list on Tweetdeck — that’s the 100 or so people that I follow closely for one reason or another. The main reason Jennifer and I liked Simon as a choice is that 1 out of every 3 tweets is a link to some great report or statistic on social media, marketing or Web 2.0. Given his background (big brand/big agency), methinks he knows about that which he speaks.
  • Point / Counterpoint: This week’s discussion was short and sweet. We focused on third part social networks’ “ownership” of content. Jennifer said that she didn’t like places like Facebook, Twitter and Ning owning some rights to her content but she went into the deal “in the know” (she reads ever word of ever terms of service). My contention is that as an individual, I don’t care much that the socnets own my stuff but when it comes to business, companies should be careful. One MAJOR argument for considering a branded only community in addition to joining these places (and yes, I admitted on the show that this is a little self-serving given the fact that I work at a company that builds branded online communities). Whatever! 😉
  • Give away: we also gave away another pass to the upcoming Inbound Marketing Summit. The lucky winner was none other than Mr. Michael J. Russel for his very clever Q-n-D Haiku. Hope he can make it!
So that’s it. That’s the recap. Don’t miss next week’s show where we’ll discuss the hashtag study that Jennifer conducted with our friend and fan, Deb Robison. If you haven’t weighed in yet, be sure to do so. Also, we are broadcasting live from Blogworld Expo in two weeks. If you have suggestions on anyone that you think we should interview, tweet us or put your reco in the comments!

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