Tue, 07/27/2010 – 08:21 by Forrester, late to the LBS party, tells most marketers to “wait and see” on Foursquare and other LBS apps/sites. The chief complaint is that adoption is not large enough for most large marketers to care and it’s a mostly male audience according to the firm’s survey data.
AdAge
covers the findings:
Almost 80% of location-based service users are male. Close to 70% of them are between the ages of 19 and 35, and 70% have college degrees or higher. Forrester also found these location-app users to be influential . . . and they are especially receptive to mobile coupons and offers . . . This small audience is still attractive to some marketers. Forrester recommends that gaming, consumer electronics and sportswear marketers lead the way with testing these apps . . .
To its credit Forrester does recommend that some brands and marketers go after this audience, which is acknowledged to be populated with influencers. Here’s the survey breakdown:
Image credit: AdAge While the general underlying advice — marketer know thy audience — is sound, the danger is that this data and the coverage surrounding it will create a “negative halo” and cause some marketers to think they can “wait another year” before testing and engaging with mobile in general. They cannot.
There are a number of LBS apps and mobile websites focused on local that are mainstream now (e.g., Google, Yelp, Yellowbook). In addition, retailers and brands should be considering mobile loyalty programs (including SMS) and actively testing them today so that later they won’t be in the “trial and error phase” — while their competitors trounce them with innovative campaigns and best practices developed while they hestitated.
Mobile loyalty marketing and mobile brand marketing have have already proven effective and in many cases much more effective than online. (However mobile shouldn’t be considered a stand-alone medium.)
Regarding the 4% audience metrics, they could mislead marketers as well. The US mobile Internet is already 75 million people operating at different levels of engagement. With more people buying smartphones daily those numbers may cross 100 million by the end of this year.
There’s also value in being able to test campaigns and marketing tactics outside the glare of major media and large public audiences. In many ways these smaller audiences — still in the millions — offer a great opportunity for marketers to try and fail and refine their approaches for broader application later.
