Guest Blogger Alan Edgett: Location-Based Services -- Where do you Stand?
In a recent conversation with a local real estate agent about her business, I heard her utter a familiar line: "It's all about location! location! location!" Only, she wasn't talking about my future housing needs. Rather, she was commenting on all the changes within digital marketing that are affecting her business. She emphasized how consumers are increasingly using their mobile phones for Internet information, whether to find a new Thai restaurant, a local plumber or, in her case, checking the listing information and mobile Web pages of local real estate agents.
Many companies are responding to customers' changing approach to finding information and businesses by using location-based services (LBSs) - online services that aim to bring more information to consumers via their handheld devices and smart phones. Foursquare, Twitter, Yelp, even Facebook Mobile, are all popular applications that consumers and B2B customers turn to while on the road to find the products and services they need.
The challenge -- and opportunity -- this poses to many executives, especially small-business owners, is to make sure their company or product is positioned in these new location-specific marketing channels. This can be complicated, as many of these new channels do not support traditional advertising. Company representatives must spend time communicating with their customers within each channel, and manually setting up and refreshing pages on social or mobile sites. It can be time-consuming - not to mention frustrating - to accommodate all the differences within each channel: using short, 140-character snippets on Twitter, making special deals available to Foursquare users, cultivating "fans" on Facebook, etc. It can also lead to a confusing array of sites, applications, and services that need to be updated regularly to be effective. While difficult and certainly not "free," all of this activity can build a valuable asset for the future of your business: a loyal, mobile-empowered audience of potential prospects and customers.
My advice to my Realtor friend -- and to any company pursuing this new channel -- is to think of her business as a "hub" of information (advice, tips, promotions or offers), and to view the various location-based services as spokes with which to push this information out to her customers or prospects. I suggested a few tools that can help simplify this process, so she wouldn't have to spend all her time updating one service after another. One of my favorites is from a company called Posterous because you can use regular old email to send social updates (perhaps a coupon mention or update on your business), and it will automatically post to all of the other services. I also like TweetDeck to monitor multiple feeds from Twitter, and I still use Google Reader or new entrant Gist to aggregate the commentary on businesses or topics I want to follow.
Setting up these tools and joining the conversation is a first step to taking a 360-degree approach to online marketing. If you're not familiar with these tools, it doesn't take long to figure them out. And by doing so, it will increase your relationship value as a "trusted advisor" to your customers in their search for the right local flavor.
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About the Author: Alan Edgett is an Internet marketing strategist who currently handles Media Optimization and New Product Innovation within the Product Group at WebVisible.
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