Placepunch: Loyalty and Marketing Strategy for your Food Truck

While you are out and about walking the streets of your city, don’t be surprised if you get a personalized tweet from a nearby food truck in the near future. It might be offering you a free meal in celebration of your tenth check in for the month.

As location based software (LBS) applications like Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt continue to evolve their respective advertising models, third-party providers are busy building platforms of their own that leverage the communities surrounding such applications and services for unique integrated marketing campaigns.

One such Atlanta based startup, PlacePunch, has launched a new platform that allows businesses of any size to run their own location based marketing campaigns that integrate with Foursquare, Facebook Places, Twitter, Gowalla and others; effectively providing a one stop platform to leverage mobile location from all the major players. The platform allows for a variety of campaigns, including loyalty and rewards programs that take advantage of check-ins, proximity to certain venues and other location oriented attributes.

PlacePunch provides the entire infrastructure necessary, including branded sign-up pages, mobile coupon delivery and analytics, so for example, your food truck can create a loyalty program that counts customer check-ins towards certain rewards and coupons. Marketers can also run personalized messaging programs through Twitter for customers that check into their venues, so if customers check-in to your food truck, you would be able to set up a recurring Tweet welcoming them.

This platform provides the added benefit of a comprehensive dashboard. This dashboard of reports and analytics is set up to help businesses learn more about their customers and venues, including demographics, time of check-ins, and more. While your mobile restaurant could initiate the same type of campaign with the various LBS applications independently, by using PlacePunch you are provided with a streamlined and centralized environment to leverage the location-craze.

If you are interested in learning how PlacePunch can help your mobile food business increase check-ins and customer loyalty, please contact them or investigate their website. Please note, the software is free to download while the application in its beta phase.

By Richard Myrick|2017-03-31T08:44:14-04:00Feb 2, 2011|Technology|

About the Author: Richard Myrick

Richard Myrick is an architect by degree (Lawrence Technological University, Southfield, Michigan) who began his career in real estate development and architectural planning. In September of 2010 he created Mobile Cuisine Magazine to fill an information void he found when he began researching how to start a mobile hotdog cart in Chicago. Richard found that there was no central repository of mobile street food information anywhere on the internet, and with that, the idea for MCM was born. Richard also wrote the "Running a Food Truck for Dummies" available in bookstores everywhere and Amazon. You can reach out to Richard by email at: [email protected].