Foursquare Marketing is an excellent method for promoting location-based businesses in different sectors. With more than 20 million active users, Foursquare has established itself as the leading platform for location-based marketing. What makes Foursquare appealing is that it enables customers to check into your business using their smartphones and computers, sharing information with their networks on Foursquare, Twitter, and Facebook. If you’re not familiar with Foursquare, don’t worry. Soon, we’ll explore the best practices for using Foursquare Marketing for your local business.
Best Practices for FourSquare Marketing
Create and Optimize Your Foursquare Page
The first and most important step in FourSquare marketing is to create and optimize your foursquare page. Your Foursquare business page is like your company’s internet marketing hub where you can manage all your locations at once. It is also a place to engage and interact with your customers and prospects as well. Make sure that you list all your business locations and provide up to date information relating to your business.
The beauty of Foursquare is that pages are highly customizable and so they can be branded. You can add a custom banner or include your business logo plus links back to your website and social networks. One good content marketing strategy for FourSquare page administrators is to leave tips at your locations and any relevant ones. You can leave branded messages for existing customers and also new customers.
Create FourSquare Specials
Another way to maximize FourSquare marketing is to make use of FourSquare specials. I know that many businesses want to build customer loyalty and motivate customers for repeat business. Fortunately, FourSquare allows business establishments to create promotions and announce deals. You really have no excuse not use FourSquare marketing when you a great chance to offer discounts and announce specials.
You can create newbies, check-ins, friends, loyal customers, and even patrons specials to customers who check into who your establishment. Besides creating Four Square check-in specials to reward new and existing customers, can also offer small discounts and small prizes to customers who make a specific number of visits to your establishment.
Add Foursquare Buttons to Your Website
Incorporating Foursquare Marketing to your website is a great way of connecting with new audiences and increasing traffic back to your Foursquare page. You can do this by either adding FourSquare like buttons or save to Foursquare buttons to your website. The “like buttons” will allow your visitors to like and share your Foursquare marketing page with other potential customers. On the other hand, the save button will save your locations and send notifications to customers (via mobile phone) whenever they are near your location.
Send Local Updates
Sending local updates is another cool marketing strategy that you can use to enhance the effectiveness of your Foursquare marketing. You can send updates to existing customers who have already checked into your location or those who are nearby. You can use local updates to announce specials, deals, and offer. Promoted Updates is another great feature for newly launched businesses that want to grow their customers’ network.
The beauty of Foursquare local updates is that it supports a variety of text and image-rich information for online content marketing. Besides adding text and images, the local updates feature also supports filtering of information so that customers can share what they want. In short, don’t hesitate to use local updates to bolster your Foursquare marketing efforts. It will help you connect and share with existing customers easily.
Enhance Your Events
If you want to drive attendance using Foursquare then you should also use Foursquare on location for events. You can create and announce online and offline events and in the process encourage customers to attend or follow up on the event. You can announce a store opening, a booth, or a conference within your location.
Foursquare events can also provide valuable information to potential attendees and links back to your website or online video marketing clips in YouTube. This way, you will help interested people find out more about the event and even set aside time to check out what’s going down on the event date.
Create Badges
Another surefire Foursquare marketing strategy is to create custom badges for rewarding your customers. As a way to encourage visitors, you should reward new customers who check into your business with badges. The good thing about badges is that they make the check-in process more social, exciting, and fun. Besides that Foursquare badges can also improve your company’s image and bolster your presence significantly thus giving your better business exposure.
Make Use of Referrals
You should also consider using FourSquare referrals especially from businesses adjacent to you. You can direct customers to available parking lots and in the process they will encourage others to eat out since there is available parking space nearby. Better still, you should also approach other local businesses in proximity and ask for referrals for each other so that your customers and their customers get exposed to both business establishments. I believe that this is a powerful Foursquare Marketing strategy that can create good partnerships ( with local businesses) and increase customers check-in significantly.
Connect FourSquare with Other Social Networks
Finally, you should also integrate or connect FourSquare with other social media and content marketing platforms so that your followers can get updates about your business. You can easily link FourSquare to Twitter and Facebook to keep your prospects and followers up to date about al special deals and offers in real time.
While some people think that Foursquare Marketing will add little value to their social networks, the truth is that Foursquare is an invaluable resource for location-based businesses. It is a great way to encourage visitors and build customer loyalty. Make sure that you connect your Foursquare Marketing page with social media network and invite your fans and followers to get the word out.
Though FourSquare Marketing is a fairly new concept, it has quickly distinguished itself as the best platform for location-based marketing. FourSquare has already proven to domestic businesses that it’s a valuable tool for customer acquisition and retention. You can use it bolster your Facebook marketing and overall, your online content marketing efforts. So, if you use FourSquare consistently then you can bolster your online marketing efforts.
