Location Based Marketing and Your Time

If there’s two things any business needs more of, it’s time and customers. History will tell us if this really is the age of the “attention economy” but one thing is certain, as a business you’re competing for your customer’s attention with everything and everyone else. The time you have to spend to get that attention along with the business grows greater by the day. The last thing you probably feel you have time for is one more marketing channel to participate in and monitor.

In talking with businesses about their marketing mix and where location-based marketing fits within their strategy and tool set, I’m sensing the same sort of resistance we saw a few years ago when social media marketing entered the mix. “I don’t have time for this!” is an anguished cry I’m hearing more and more.

Let’s look at what’s involved time wise with the check-in services.

Your first time investment is to decide which service or services you’re going to invest that time in.

• Foursquare
• Gowalla
• Facebook Places
• Google Places
• Yelp

These are the ones you’ll likely be looking into. The first thing that you’ll want to do is “claim” your business listing. This is a simple matter of going to each of the sites and either setting up your business listing if it doesn’t exist or telling the service that it’s your business if it does. Each of the services has gotten pretty good about letting you know in a timely manner once your business has been set up. Once you hear back from each one that you’ve been confirmed as the owner of the location or business your next time investment begins.

A number of the services have dashboards that give you an infographical look at your customers who have checked in using those services. This is ROI reporting as you have always wished that it was. From a time perspective it’s a matter of how much you want to invest in front of those dashboards and your computer and what business value can you take away from that time invested. Once a day will be plenty for most businesses. Some will want, and need, to spend more. And if you’re so busy that you don’t have a few minutes a day to spend looking at your dashboard, some of the platforms offer a premium service to email your statistics.

Setting up your specials is your next time commitment. These vary by platform and service. You can do welcome or first time check-in specials, specials for the key holder or mayor and other specials related to frequency of check in or visit. The actual time it takes to set those up within the services themselves is a few minutes at most. It’s accomplshed through the dashboards and changing them out for fresh ones doesn’t take any longer. Most of your time commitment will involve thinking about and crafting your specials and your messages. You can do that while you’re asleep, right? Let the night time muses inspire you.

This is your basic time commitment. A few minutes each day in front of your business dashboard to see how these location based marketing services are working for you and your business. That’s not really very much is it? And let me ask you, what other marketing tools and channels are giving you that sort of real time look and interaction with your customer base? There are a few social media ones to be sure. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of one traditional channel that provides you with that kind of measurement.

Can you spend more time on location based marketing than this? You bet. You can use these same location based tools to listen to what your customers and prospective customers are saying. You can see how your competitors are doing in the location based space in terms of check-ins and specials. You can post lots of pictures of your business, your customers, your goods and services. Video isn’t far behind. We’ll talk about all of those in upcoming posts.