Driving Foot Traffic with the Latest Social Media Tools from the NRA Show

The biggest educational session attended at the NRA show was paneled by Tristan Walker, the Business Development Lead at Foursquare and Andrew Mason, the founder and CEO of Groupon. The session titled “Driving Foot Traffic with the Latest Social Media Tools” definitely lived up to its title as these two spoke way past the allotted 90 minutes and stayed after waiting to speak with at least 100 people lined up. Both of these two tools got a lot of discussion at other sessions and among the attendees and with good reason. Both have the potential to bring hordes of free traffic through your door, which is something we all need.

Foursquare solves the problem of connecting social media to direct traffic. It is a local lead generation tool. Tristan said the goal of Foursquare is to get people to explore and incentivize them to do so. It is a social city guide where people check into their location to unlock badges.

http://foursquare.com/businesses/ has tons of examples of what other businesses are doing to engage customers. Whether you are in retail, restaurants and just about every other category, Foursquare should be used. It is not as labor intensive for you as Twitter or Facebook and the results and social media ROI are real and measurable.

Tristan said the simple task of adding a check in promotion is showing a 15% to 20% increase in check-ins for a business. Once you get these customers in the door, add them to your mobile campaign. You can also tie check-ins to your loyalty card. Combining social media with your loyalty program will increase customer interaction and sales. Tristan showed a couple examples of businesses doing this and it is a great idea to drive sales and loyalty.

If you are not using Foursquare yet, it only takes a few minutes to claim your businesses venue. CLICK HERE to go to a previous article we wrote on that.

We have talked about Groupon in the past here, but Andrew shared some stats that were impressive to the audience. The main demographic of a Groupon customer is 70% female, aged 21-35 and makes over $100K a year. Not your typical coupon customer and also the hardest to target and get in your business.

Of past businesses who have used the service, 96% were satisfied, 97% would use again and 96% would recommend Groupon to others. Groupon can expose your business to thousands of new customers in a single day. When Andrew said the results your business will experience with one day on their site are unmatchable, I believe him. Businesses show that the average customer spends 50 to 60% over the value of the gift certificate and a high customer retention rate.

He showed a couple of examples of businesses selling 9 thousand plus certificates in a single day. It seems the only problem will be making sure you are able to handle such a large spike in sales and then be able to perform your best for these customers to make them repeat after the sale. Also with all of these new customers, work to actively get them into your mobile database

http://www.groupon.com/groupon-works is the business owner side of the site with more resources and a form to fill out to get featured on Groupon in your city.