While LBS apps like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt and others continue to evolve their respective advertising models, third-party providers are busy building platform of their own that leverage the communities surrounding such apps and services for unique integrated marketing campaigns.
One such startup, PlacePunch, recently debuted a new platform that allows businesses both big and small to run their own location-based marketing campaigns that integrate with Foursquare, Facebook Places, Twitter, Gowalla and others — effectively providing a one-stop platform to leverage mobile location from all the major players. The platform allows for a variety of campaigns, including loyalty and rewards programs that take advantage of checkins, proximity to certain venues and other location-oriented attributes.
PlacePunch provides all the infrastructure necessary, including branded sign-up pages, mobile coupon delivery and analytics, so for example, a coffee shop can create a loyalty program that counts customer check-ins towards certain rewards and coupons. Marketers can also run personalized messaging programs through Twitter for customers that check into their venues, so if customers check-in to your coffee shop, you could set up a recurring Tweet welcoming them.
The platform provides the added benefit of a comprehensive dashboard for businesses to see various reports and analytics, providing insight about their customers such as demographics, time of check-ins, etc. While a business could initiate the same campaigns with the various LBS apps and networks independently, doing so through PlacePunch provides a streamlined and centralized environment to leverage the location-craze. We’ll definitely be keeping our eyes on this one.
