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. And the time you have to spend to get that attention and that business grows greater by the day. The last thing you probably feel that 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. We’ll leave the other location based services that you might also be looking at weaving into your marketing mix for another post.
Your first time investment is to decide which service or services you’re going to invest that time in. TriOut, if you’re in the Reasearch Triangle Park area of North Carolina, Foursquare, Gowalla or MyTown are the ones you’ll likely be looking into. Spend just a little time looking through the web sites of each and you’ll see that TriOut and Foursquare are the only ones that let you claim your business and use that to engage with your customer community. MyTown lets customers “own” businesses so to speak.
Your next time investment then is to claim your business or location. Both TriOut and Foursquare have made that a pretty simple process that requires only a few moments. 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.
Both services have dashboards 
that give you an infographical look at your customers who have checked in using those services. There are some differences between the two in that area and we won’t get into those in this post. From a time perspective it’s a matter of how much you want to invest in front of those dashboards 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, TriOut’s premium service will email you your statistics.
Setting up your specials will be your next time commitment. 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. 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. I suspect that what drives that anguished cry I mentioned earlier is a lack of understanding just what this brave new world of location based marketing has to offer and what it involves.
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 another post.
Have a great weekend and here’s hoping you get lots of check ins that ring those regsiters!
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