Written by Alberto Perea
The development of mobile technology is managing to dizzyingly modify the purchasing behavior of many potential customers thanks to geolocation, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by Mobile Marketing experts.
The irruption of Smartphones in the market has meant a revolution in the marketing world, which has seen in geolocation an opportunity, a new way to make itself known to its customers.
According to the Comscore study “Spain Digital future in focus”, Spain is the country with the highest Smartphone penetration rate, with 66%, and the country with the highest growth in the acquisition of tablets, with 70% compared to the year before the study.
Some 13% of Smartphone users used their mobile devices to find the location of a store or venue, and 10% used their Smartphone to make purchases.
Advertisers and companies in general cannot ignore this data and must try to make the most of this medium, but how?
One of the many possibilities offered by the use of mobile technology is to be able to geolocate your store, establishment or premises so that it can be more easily located by your customers.
To do so, you can register your company in one of these four successful Apps dedicated to geolocation.
Four indispensable Apps for business geolocation
Foursquare
Foursquare is a mobile application in which users share the geolocation of all kinds of businesses: bars, restaurants, hotels, stores, malls…, and share their opinions about them.
The application, based on your own “checks in” and those of your list of friends and taking into account your opinions and preferences, suggests new stores and places that you might like.
An application to find the best fashionable places in your city, according to your own tastes.
In addition, Foursquare rewards its most active users with medals, which helps to increase the volume of “Checks in”.
As a company, to be present on Foursquare you don’t have to do anything at all, it’s enough for a user to register it as a venue or place. But if you want to get the most out of the application, we recommend that you go ahead and create it yourself or claim the management of your file, as this way you will be able to:
- Edit your Foursquare profile
- Customer loyalty based on feedback and promotions in the application
- Know the characteristics of users who have visited your company profile on Foursquare.
Foursquare reserves the right to manage all reviews, so you will not be able to delete the ones you consider negative.
Yelp
Yelp is another application where you can register your company or local business. It is an application with features very similar to Foursquare, since the users themselves are responsible for geolocating the companies, as well as sharing opinions and a host of features about them.
They also share the possibility of to be present on the Yelp App without the need of 
registrationThe only thing that would be needed is for a user to register it, but, as in Foursquare, if you want to have control over your profile, in addition to carrying out a feedback with your customers, as well as to get information about the traffic to your Yelp page, you must first you must claim your company profile.
To register in Yelp, you can opt for a free version or the paid version, although in neither case you can filter user reviews, this task is reserved by the application.
It could be said that the difference on Foursquare and Yelpis that the first is designed to locate new stores and local businesses to the user’s taste, while Yelp would have the function of to make available all relevant information, as well as the opinions of other users about establishments and companies to be visited.
Lanetro
The Lanetro application has the same functionality as Foursquare, based on your tastes and preferences indicated through your “Checks in” and opinions about local stores and businesses, it offers you new places to visit.
Lanetro uses your preferences, tastes and opinions and those of your list of friends in order to offer you new places of personal interest. Its market is mainly Spain, so it could be considered the Spanish Foursquare.
They are currently working with a closed database of premises, stores and companies in general, but as we can read in their corporate information page “we are working so that soon you will be able to register yourself, in an easy and simple way, the restaurant, cinema, theater, concert or store of your choice“. So stay tuned to register your company in Lanetro.
Tripadvisor
TripAdvisor is a purely tourist-themed site, although it works in a similar way to the previous ones, as the users themselves are the ones who nurture its database.
In this application it is the users who offer tourist information about different destinations where they have been, as well as additional information about lodging, restaurants, places of interest, activities and other valuable information for the traveler.
To register as a business on Tripadvisor you must fill out a form. Tripadvisor offers a free service to companies, so that they can appear on the portal.
You also have the option of inserting an advertisement in one of the pages of the portal. This is their way of generating income.
If you want to learn more about TripAdvisor, follow this link.
To conclude
All these applications share three points in common, they combine in a single medium the social, local and mobile aspects of any company, so the marketing strategy will have to take them all into account and unify them.
This type of marketing strategy is known as SO LO MO (Social, Local, Mobile). When approaching a marketing strategy , we must combine the social aspect, the purchasing behavior of customers and their proximity .
The applications described here are ideal tools to address this type of strategy, as they work both as a social network (social), as a means to locate businesses and companies within a distance radius (local) and through mobile technology (mobile).
Mobile technology and geolocation are playing an increasingly important role in the purchasing process. Update your marketing strategy and take advantage of all the benefits of geolocation.
