Location-based marketing can be a valuable customer acquisition strategy and a way to break though the noise when competing for the attention of potential prospects. Foursquare offers a free set of tools to help you attract new customers and keep your best ones coming back.
Using Foursquare as a marketing communication channel is beneficial because although a relatively small user base (as of March 2011, 8 Million users), they are loyal and consistent users. It also takes almost no time to develop a campaign and special offer, so the return on investment can be high. Foursquare marketing is most appropriate for brick and mortar businesses, but anyone can take advantage of Foursquare.
Dreamforce had 45,000 registered attendees and 30,000 who actually attended the conference. The challenges of exhibiting at The Cloud Computing Event of the Year is to stand out from other exhibitors, capture the attention of attendees and drive them to the booth as they browse through the exhibition hall. We leveraged Foursquare to interact, share, and meet up with prospects based on their physical attendance at Dreamforce.
Here’s how we captured the sole attention of those Dreamforce attendees 1,748 times during the four-day event:
Getting started
There are three short and easy steps you need to do to get started:
- Claim your venue. Search for your location, check to see if it is owned. Claim it.
- Create a special. This is easy. Foursquare has a range of different types of Specials designed to get new customers to the venue, endorse specific promotions, or reward your most loyal customers.
- Refine campaigns to maximize business. Track your activity. Do so by checking the real time statistics on the Venue Stats dashboard to see which type of special and what kind of special is driving the most traffic to your location.
Foursquare Specials
Here are the types of Specials we offered during Dreamforce.
- Newbie Special: A way for businesses to entice new customers to give them a try.
- Check-in Special: A catch-all Special for various types of promotions.
- Flash Special: Target a specific time of day or create a sense of urgency.
- Friends Special: Incentives groups of friends to check in together.
Users discover Specials three different ways. Foursquare outlines the ways and how the user finds out about Specials:
- When users are looking at the nearby “Places tab on their phone, venues that have active Specials are highlighted.
- From the Places tab, users can click through to the list of Specials Nearby, where they can see detail on all of the different Specials being offered in their proximity
- When a user checks in to our business, they’ll see that you are offering a Special
During the week of Dreamforce we set up five offers, as listed below. We combined different Specials to optimize foot traffic to our booth.
To promote the Specials, we Tweeted about the check-in Special each day. Specials are also frequently viewed as step during then ‘check-in’ process.
Venue Stats
Once you become a Manager of a venue, you have access to the Venue Stats dashboard, allowing you to track your venue traffic over time.
Claiming your Venue allows you to see a full set of real-time data about your customers, including:
- Total daily check-ins over time
- Your most recent visitors
- Your most frequent visitors
- Gender breakdown of your customers
- What time of day people check in
- Portion of your venue’s foursquare check-ins that are broadcast to Twitter and Facebook
Here are the Dreamforce 2011 venue statistics on the three most attended days and the statistics from the entire conference.
Looking at the public Dreamforce 2011 venue page, you can see:
- Total number of people who checked in
- Total number of check-ins
- Photos people are sharing
- Tips for the venue
In addition to the publicly available data, here are a few revealing facts from the Venue Stats dashboard that the Manager only has access to:
- 30% of users shout out their check-in to their social network.
- The percentage of sharing is consistently equal for Facebook and Twitter.
- 70% of the people who checked in were male, 30% female.
- People started checking in six days before the conference started. A total of 189 check-ins pre-conference.
- During the four-day conference, there were a total of 2,466 check-ins.
To create a comprehensive Foursquare presence, we also created a Foursquare Brand page to stay engaged with our followers and enhance brand communication as we attend other events across the country.
To stand out from the other 300 exhibitors we leveraged Foursquare campaigns to create brand awareness and drive people our booth during the conference the moment they arrived on site. Although we haven’t yet determined return on investment for revenue generated from this campaign, we did have several people stop by our booth just to ask about how we snagged the venue of the world’s largest enterprise software conference; which turned out to be a great conversation starter.
This is one article in a multi-part series on SOLOMO (Social, Local and Mobile) Marketing
