Rural Office Space Uses Mobile Marketing

It has been a year since The Midas Center has moved to the prominent location in a rural downtown main street of Plymouth, Indiana. There are many benefits a rural downtown location can bring to a professional service provider that is able to rely on technology to work virtually or remotely for larger client projects. 

The Midas Center is no stranger to downtown locations. Owner Andrea Cook started the creative communications consultancy in 1999 in Chicago and appreciates the hustle bustle the 9 to 5 daily grind brings to the center of a city. Whether your office location is in the Loop or a rural downtown, the traffic made by foot and car makes for a prime advertising opportunity to attract and promote business.

Aside from creative window displays and designs, businesses can optimize their outreach by using social and mobile media.

Here are some of the campaigns that The Midas Center is currently running through Foursquare and Facebook. Perhaps you too can implement them for your office location and capture that downtown buzz and foot traffic.  

1. Foursquare Tips, Campaigns and Specials

In addition to consulting services, The Midas Center provides shared cowork space for professionals. To reach more local professionals, some simple campaigns and specials have been created through Foursquare. If you have not created a venue for your business on Foursquare, you are missing an opportunity to engage.

Want to get some more free real estate on Foursquare? Add a simple tip about your business. Include basic information as a tip, such as:   

“The first cowork space to offer professionals a meeting place. Great coffee and golden synergy, just two of the many benefits. Daily and monthly passes are available.”

The next recommendations require you to add a little more skin into the game. And by skin, I simply mean some swag  to give away. Then, once you’ve decided what swag or giveaways you are comfortable with investing, there are a variety of campaigns and specials that can be created in simple steps using Foursquare.  

Consider two levels of giveaways for each level of participation. A user checking in to your venue for the first time, may get a lighter valued giveaway, versus a loyal user to checks into your venue frequently. Fortunately, Foursquare has built a system based on this principle that is simple to set up. For example, when someone checks-in to The Midas Center Cowork Space for the first time, the user “unlocks” the Newbie level and then gets one free daily pass to use at the cowork space. One free daily pass is valued at $20. A day pass would not be a worthy giveaway for a mayor however. At The Midas Center, when a user becomes our mayor, then this message shows:

 

How can someone become the mayor? A Foursquare mayor is the user who has checked-in the most in the past 60 days. That is the playful and addicting side of this social game. You’d be surprised the number of adults who earn bragging rights by becoming mayor at leading venues. Some places will offer free cheese burgers, drinks, etc.

There are a lot of venues who want users to check-in to their venues on Foursquare but try tempting them with lame specials. This is not recommended. If businesses are investing the time to give social and mobile marketing tactics a try, then they need to make sure that their reward is attractive enough. The perfect mix will depend on each venue’s budget, audience -type and -interests. 

Newbies get a free daily pass for checking in the first time at The Midas Center. Mayors get an entire monthly pass for free, valued at $200! 

We also are running a special called a Loyalty level. Once users check-in on their third time, they unlock the Loyalty level and this appears:

Free passes and coffee mugs are the giveaways for our Foursquare campaigns. We’re able to track progress as well as manage the schedule with a start and end date. Foursquare also provides some handy dandy guides you can print to encourage people to check in. They look like this: 

To promote this campaign, we’ve placed these print-outs in our window. We also are highlighting this campaign through a variety of local social media communities. It’s too early to share information about the success. We can tell you that setting up these campaigns with Foursquare took less than 2 hours so right our the gate, our starting investment is low. If we get one person who checks in, we will be satisfied. How’s that for low expectations? 

The other area of new media marketing that we are implementing to our outreach is through the advertising offerings provided by Facebook. 

2. Facebook Ads, Recommendations and Deals

With over 800 million users on Facebook, we now have more friends to socialize online with than ever before. The average numer of friends each user has is 130. Over half of the total number of users log in to Facebook a day and 56% of Facebook users update their status on a weekly basis.  

The only people who are discounting Facebook’s value are people who don’t understand or are trying to compete with it. As a small business with chump-change pockets, we LOVE Facebook. Since the local newspaper won’t run any of our press releases without a commitment of big dollar advertising support, we rely on Facebook for our go-to channel to share information and reach our audience. Here are some of the ways we are putting our Facebook page to work for us. 

Ads.    The Midas Center routinely will recommend Facebook ad campaigns for clients. No other media allows you to reach and measure a targeted audience so effectively. It’s cost-effective too. One client of ours received a 4000% ROI on a 30 day run of a Facebook ad. We have some Facebook ads in place to encourage both impressions and clicks. One of the ads we are running offers users a free eBook on 65 Reasons to Cowork. Right now, the landing page for the eBook is embedded on our Facebook page, however, we plan to use our web site for this in the future. We run a lot of testing to see what type of image and message gets the most activity. With daily budgets as low as $2, we can play around and experiment a bit.

Recommendations.     Facebook also has an area along the right side of their site for recommendations. You may be surprised the brands your friends have recommended. Why not encourage users to recommend your business page? This is what the recommendations look like: 

When people add a recommendation on Facebook, it is displayed to all of their friends. This is great exposure and a solid dose of credibility for the business page! 

Printed Referral Program.      To encourage people to add recommendations, we are currently running a referral program that outlines the steps necessary to recommend The Midas Center on Facebook. When users refer The Midas Center Cowork Space to their Facebook friends, they receive $20 and their friend who signs up gets a significant discount off their first monthly pass. We recently sent a letter campaign that details this campaign. We also are sharing the referral program through online outreach like this blog post. Do you want to participate? Click here for details >>

Deals.      Lastly, we also are participating in Facebook’s Deals. This feature allows Facebook users to “check-in” with their mobile devices like smart phones or iPads. Although there are rumors that Facebook discontinued this feature shortly after they rolled it out last year, the Deal is still available for businesses near The Midas Center location in northern Indiana. The Deal appears on the right side bar of the page and looks like this:

Facebook recommends posting this offer to your own page no more than once per day. These Deals can be scheduled and once the deal is approved, you cannot alter the schedule or message. It is unclear at this time how effective Facebook deals are. So far, the campaign has been active for a couple of weeks and no one has checked-in. I tried to but can never seem to navigate the process successfully. 

Our Overarching Campaign: Check-in, Get Free Stuff

The Midas Center is just trying to encourage pedestrians and road warriors passing by the window space to “check in, get free stuff” via Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare. If the imprint is made on their minds that we are offering “free stuff,” then perhaps we can get some mindshare and added exposure when they do check-in via their mobile devices.  

Sometimes reaching beyond the specific message and -medium is the actual message of the medium. 

The Midas Center sees social and mobile marketing as a must. As a forward-thinking creative communications consultancy, The Midas Center is claiming the social and mobile media space as an expert. How can we recommend marketing solutions to clients if we aren’t practicing what we preach? 

Want to get free stuff? Come on over and “check-in.” If you travel more than 30 miles, I’ll even buy you lunch! Although, I’m not sure that level-type is on Foursquare so you’ll have to prompt me with a verbal, “Let’s do lunch” like they did in the old days when people met in person and talked. ;)