The Next Step: Interactive Location Marketing

We have seen traditional media, digital media and social media all rise to rule the marketing world. Each successive media brings with it a new level of personalized advertising messages, helping companies increase their efficiency of message. 

Many marketing experts believe location-based media is the logical next step in communicating to a perpetually plugged-in populace. By incorporating location media, marketers can target core target markets through each consumer’s real life experiences.

In the AdWeek article “Digital Gets Physical”, the author explores the popularity of the location theme at this year’s South by Southwest Interactive Festival, held in March.

“One of the most promising areas for this type of engagement is mobile. Location-based services were all the rage at South by Southwest. The current darlings of the space, Foursquare and Gowalla, hosted competing parties and efforts to win over the festival's early-adopter crowds. Both offer similar platforms, allowing users to 'check in' to places to alert their friends and also reap virtual rewards.”

Both Foursquare and Gowalla offer applications which allow people to virtually “check in” through their phones at participating locations.   

By doing this, four things can occur: 

• People can search their friends and find out what restaurants, night clubs, and stores their friends are currently at or have visited.

• The consumer can receive coupons and promotions based on the number of times they have “checked in” to a certain place, even promoting visitors to “mayor”  status if they go often enough.  

• Viewers can see which venues are the most populated, informing consumers where the “hot spots” are currently located. 

• Check-ins can help fuel real-time marketing initiatives of participating companies.  

In the New York Times article “Digitally Location Is Where It’s At” the benefits companies can receive through viewer check ins are highlighted.

“What if a highly influential person suddenly became the mayor of your obscure little webcast, new book or you saw that your friends were checking in on a critically acclaimed but struggling new network show? Cue the lemmings and viral things might happen.”

Currently Foursquare and Gowalla only offer location-based check-in’s but as the company grows, so do their goals for check-in expansion.

“It doesn’t just have to be about where to get a good cup of coffee,” said Dennis Crowley, a co-founder of Foursquare. “It could be about a certain type of movie and then perhaps you’d get an offer of another movie in that category. Right now, we are focused on place because we have a small team, but eventually, we could support check-ins to anything. It’s really about experiences people have had.”