Offered Local Blog

Here a deal, there a deal, everywhere a deal deal

Posted by Ed Loessi on March 6, 2011

As if we didn’t already have enough daily, weekly or even monthly deal sites, there was quick coverage in Xconomy Seattle regarding Bing‘s foray into the deal aggregation space:

Bing Tries to Make Sense of Rapidly Crowding Daily Deals Space

Truth is We Love It!

The more ways to create deals (daily, weekly, monthly) and the more ways to distribute them; social media, location based marketing and search based marketing the better. It’s interesting to consider how far this will all be able to extend itself. Consider this, that billions upon billions of dollars of commerce take place every year from physical locations and of course we all want a deal, so unlike some markets it would seem as if the market for deals and deal type services; coupons, offers and promotions is extremely large and clearly at an early point.

So, if there are billions of dollars and millions of people and a 100 services to deliver your deals, what in the world are you going to do to manage it all?

At this point the best thing is to do is jump in, it will be a long time before there is a final shakeout when it comes to social media marketing (Facebook, Twitter etc.) and location based marketing (foursquare, Gowolla) and search based marketing (Google Places, Bing etc.) and the 100s of other startups coming in from around the corner. To begin you’ve got to make sure you understand the relationship between social media marketing and location based marketing and you need to have social media and location based services being used in your business, but that is all pretty easy to create.

The real need to focus on is managing the creation and distribution of coupons, offers and promotions. It can be a bit daunting but here are a few key premises:

There are likely differences between your followers based on the type of social media (Facebook v Twitter), so it is also likely that your offers and promotions will need to be different for each audience

There are differences between people who search by keywords and people who are on the road searching for a location. So, as above, it is also likely that your offers will need to be different for each of those types of services to make sure your offer is in the right time frame i.e. an offer next Tuesday doesn’t do me any good if I am driving by on a Thursday

In simple terms you need to think about the types of offers you currently make; two for Tuesday, X% off, by one get one, loyalty purchasing etc. and craft and distribute offers based on the channel and the medium.

Now, do you have to be a rocket scientist to do this correctly?, well no. What you have to do is start making offers and seeing what happens, making adjustments along the way and gaining insights into how your customers, followers and channels behave. Lots of people may get caught up in the enormity of it all but you just have to chip away at it one offer and one customer at a time.