Even if your business is nowhere near a PokéStop or a Gym, you’re still going to have Pokémon. One way to get people excited about visiting your business is to get on social media and show off the valuable or rare Pokémon popping up in your area. To know what to look for, a Reddit user has created a handy rarity chart.
You could hire a member of your staff to sit on Pokémon Go all day, lay down Incense (an in-game purchase similar to a Lure Module, but which only gives effects to the person who triggered it), and take screenshots of the Pokémon they capture. A better option, though, might be to incentivize play on the part of your customers.
Consider running it like a referral program:
- Tell users you’ll pay for their Incense or offer a discount in return for screenshots of any rare Pokémon that pop up in the vicinity of your shop.
- Have them upload the picture and tag you on social media, so that their followers know about you too.
- Promote the fact that you’re rewarding users who find rare Pokémon at your business.
Do this right, and you could turn your store into a viral destination.
Advertise Your Pokémon on Social Media
If you don’t already have a decent-sized following on social media, or if you’re looking to drive an even greater amount of traffic, then Facebook advertising is your best bet.
By creating a Facebook ad targeted only inside the geographical radius of your choice, you could spread the word about your local Pokémon only to those people able to actually stop by your store.
The vanilla Facebook advertising interface can be hard to use, so check out one of the Facebook ad managers out there if you want help. AdEspresso, one such tool, makes it easy to set whatever targeting criteria you want, whether that’s geographic (one mile around your business), demographic (ages 16 to 26), or interest-based (target users who “like” Pokémon Go on Facebook).
The advantage of targeted marketing is that you only pay for local advertisement, which increases the return on investment as the audience is most likely to come visit your premises.
As the trainers search for places to visit your premises will come up and you should be getting visitors soon.
Pokémon Go and Start Marketing Your Local Business Right Now
The naysayers inside your organization will say the same things people say whenever there’s a big paradigm shift. “This is just a fad,” they’ll say. And that could be true. People, of course, said the same thing about the original Pokémon game.
The more salient point here is that no marketing channel is evergreen, but businesses that want to win have to keep one eye open for these big shifts – and they have to capitalize on them at the right time. With Pokémon Go, businesses have an unprecedented opportunity to create strong emotional bonds with new customers, and for very little money.
Even if Pokémon Go isn’t as powerful a tool for driving sales six months or a year from now, the customers that you delight today are going to remember you tomorrow and share their experience in their friends circle or even on social media. That’s some major word-of-mouth advertising you would miss out on by treating Pokémon Go as “just another fad.”
Even if, worst case scenario, Pokémon Go is a fad, only for the next few months, isn’t that the more reason why it must be maximized right now? For the amount it costs to buy and release Lure Modules, this should be taken as a necessity for a modern business. Such a lack of foresight will soon relegate your business to the archives of history.
As Charles Darwin said, it is not the strongest or the most intelligent species that services, but the one most suited to the environment. This truism applies equally to businesses as it does to species. Evolution is, after all, the most consistent constant of life after death. Will your business thrive or die?
If McDonald’s Needs Pokémon, Why Don’t You?
Several Redditors discovered decompiled code in the Android and iOS versions of Pokémon Go earlier this week that indicated a potential sponsorship deal with global burger chain McDonald’s. Now a well-placed source has confirmed with technology blog Gizmodo that the sponsorship is moving forward, and is set to launch in one country in Asia.
Gizmodo has learned that, as part of the sponsorship, every McDonald’s restaurant in this country will either be a PokéStop or a Gym. We were unable to confirm which country would debut the partnership, but several compelling reasons point to Japan. Not only is Japan the birthplace of the Pokémon franchise and current home of The Pokémon Company, but Pokémon Go’s launch has been delayed in the land of the rising sun for seemingly no reason, leaving eager fans pissed.
Sponsored locations are old hat for Niantic, which used the same business model for its prior game Ingress—with popular Japanese convenience chain Lawson among the partners. Likewise, McDonald’s has paired with both Nintendo and The Pokémon Company for previous promotions. And some players on Reddit have pointed out that McDonald’s locations are often within walking distance (at least for city-dwellers) and have wi-fi, which could be a boon for players. What’s unclear, however, is why the partnership would only launch in one country—McDonald’s is, after all, pretty much everywhere—but it might simply be a trial of a promotional plan that Niantic hopes to push out more broadly.
The whole point of Pokémon Go is to get out in your environment and interact with it. Don’t just snap photos of your Pokémon, make sure you get plenty of local landmarks in the pictures, too. You could even invite your followers to join you in the game and offer tips on how to win your Poke-battles, how to lure out more Pokémon, or where to find the imaginary creatures in your area.
Whether the Pokémon Go phenomenon will last has yet to be seen, but for now, it’s big. And it’s an easy way for you to interact with your customers. As noted below, it does appear that the best model is one that combines several strategies. Already there are affiliate programs for Pokémon Go collector items. How this works is that if you drive traffic to the site and a purchase is made from your site then you get a great commission from the hook up.
As these are not food or other mass market, high competition goods, the margins are in the 20 percent and above of the revenues. It does appear that online shops don’t have as many opportunities as brick and mortar premises, perhaps driving the margins even higher.
