All the attention this year is on location-based marketing services and how every website will soon know exactly where you are at any given moment—serving up targeted push advertising via mobile phone and PDA. But the idea of using location as a way to build brand relationships and drive consumer behavior has been around for as long as CRM has been around and savvy companies have been using it in their arsenal of digital marketing tools.
Gaspari Nutrition is one of these digitally savvy companies. Born from the ultra-competitive world of bodybuilding, Gaspari spent the last 2 years cultivating a massive database of customers, fans, and sport enthusiasts. Driving this harvesting of fans was the creation of quality content in the form of video programming, contests, and live events with athletes.
While this database has provided Gaspari with a cost-effective way to promote products and drive traffic to the website, the bigger opportunity was leveraging the location information provided by customers to drive traffic to local events and demos. Billed as “sport and fitness training seminars” and branded under the label “Revolution Tour,” these demo events are held at retail shops across the US and Canada and are a chance for brand loyalists to meet athletes, learn about nutrition, and get free samples of Gaspari products. Each month Gaspari reps do a total of 100 to 200 of these events.
Events are managed through a proprietary management application developed by Electric Vine that gives Gaspari control over scheduling, approval and even local promotional activities. After each event, reps are required to complete a post-event report which provides valuable feedback on which events are successful and provides insight into ROI.
But the exciting piece is the simple process of using location to map users to events in their area, and then sending targeted email blasts. Gaspari uses the Bullseye Locations platform to provide the geo-matching, and an integrated CRM platform to send and manage the emails. These blasts go out weekly, and are optimized to eliminate duplication: each member of the database receives only one email listing all the events near them. Since starting geo-targeted emails, attendance at local demo events has increased by 500%.
With this success, Gaspari is seeing the potential for location-based marketing to launch them to the next level. In 2011, they plan to expand the event program internationally and will also begin exploring how to integrate other location-based services. Who knows what’s next for them…check in?
