3 Ways to Optimize Your Business for SoLoMo

Do you SoLoMo? Yes, I realize that may sound like the newest offering from the Starbucks menu, but the acronym stands for social, local, mobile. What you need to do however, is wrap your head around why SoLoMo is a very important concept and marketing tool for your small business to use.

So what is SoLoMo and why do you need it?

The union of these three was virtually unavoidable. As location based services have become ever more advanced, tracking our every move, it was not an enormously huge step to having businesses be able to reach out and touch someone, (like you!) with location based notifications and offers. Pew Internet & American Life Project recently learned that around 74 percent of smartphone users use their mobile devices to obtain local information, and approximately 18 percent are using them to check in on local businesses with geo-location services like Foursquare, Yelp and others. As more and more mobile users are searching for local products and services, either you and your company will find a way to serve these people, who are out, phone in hand and wallet virtually open, or you’ll notice that your competitors will!

3 Ways to engage with SoLoMo

  • Use social media – By making use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter and others to engage and inform your customers and prospects, you’ve found a most effective and low-cost way to build relationship and energize your brand simultaneously.
  • Optimize your local presence – Make sure your small business is optimized in local search directories that are appropriate, and you are actively catering to local business in your marketing.
  • Spend some on mobile marketing – Mobile ads are returning excellent ROIs, since most users who are searching local are out there searching for it in the field. Also, some local advertising strategies are cheap or free, such as check in deal on Facebook or FourSquare.

One terrific example of a company that gets SoLoMo is personified by Walgreens. Checking in with Foursquare gives their customers coupons and much more! SoLoMo isn’t going away anytime soon, so make sure you get there before your competition does!