Local Response is a new tool that promises to aggregate social media posts to find your customers based on the things they are posting online. It is based on the premise that as a business owner, you just don’t have the time to weed through everything yourself to find the right people to reach out to. It compiles all of the necessary data and then identifies the first people you should try and connect with.
It doesn’t simply identify those that are mentioning your business by name. It finds people in your local area and looks at interests and routines to determine who might be a captive audience. It takes this data from more than a dozen different social media sites. Once it has identified the individuals your business should be reaching out to, it helps you put together a special offer to hook them. Mystery Shopping.
While so far their offerings seem enticing, it’s the offer part that enters into a grey area – it could be beneficial, or it may not be at all, depending on the intent of the prospective customers. The thing with many social media sites is that individuals don’t necessarily need to beat a specific location to post that they are. There is also no ingrained honesty detector to monitor the truth in their general statements. What this means is that people could theoretically catch on to what Local Response does and start making specific posts to appear as though they’re the most appealing customers to get a deal.
The strategy that should work with a tool like this is as follows:
- Find the people that could become paying customers
- Entice the people that could become paying customers
- Keep them hooked as full price paying customers after that initial offer gets them through the door
What could very well end up happening instead is:
- Find the people that could become paying customers
- Entice the people that could become paying customers
- Teach these people that COULD become full price paying customers that they NEVER have to pay full price again if they play their cards right online. These people may also tell their friends what they’ve learned
So the bottom line here is use the tool to identify your target market, but be careful to step away from Local Response to look at an individual’s social media stream. This way, you can ensure you are not looking at someone putting up a front for a bargain.
