It's one of the big challenges of the wide-open, global Internet: How to use it to help customers in your town find you. At a recent two-day "hackathon" event hosted by the New York business incubator General Assembly and American Express OPEN, more than 100 developers met to work on this problem.
They came up with more than 25 different software "hacks," or applications, that help consumers shop local. The apps do everything from helping you find a good local meeting venue to turning up local properties for sale.
Here are a few highlights:
- Building.ly -- Want to send a special offer or incentive deal only to workers in a few nearby office towers or condo buildings? This is the micro-targeting app for that.
- Eatpager -- Eatpager helps diners explore which restaurants are near their current locale, using foursquare and data from your local municipality. So far, it has New York City data on board.
- Poorsquare -- Want to do a local giveaway? This app lets users search foursquare, cutting the data there to show only free deals. This one's also just in New York City so far, but what a great idea. Watch this one spread.
- Fresh Tomatoes -- Wonder what customers are saying about your joint on restaurant-review sites? This hack aggregates reviews from Zagat, Yelp, CitySearch, MenuPages and many others into one convenient spot. It even boils down all the reviews for an eatery and gives you one average rating.
- FarmerFare -- If you sell at farmer's markets, this tool allows consumers to connect with you even when you're not at your stand. Consumers create a grocery list, enter their zip code, and are shown results with local farmers who could provide the goods they seek. This allows customers to quickly see what's available and in-season, and then order ahead either for delivery, or for pickup at a nearby farmers market.
How do you find local customers online? Leave a comment and let us know.
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Comments:
Really like the suggestions.
Definitely growing and I've seen more enthusiasts.
Your blog is pretty good and impressed me a lot. This article along with the images is quite in-depth and gives a good overview of the topic.
I cannot get on to the building.ly app. Any suggestions? Teral
Hard to believe #AMEX excluded franchises from Small Business Saturday! http://bit.ly/vS3YOk #AmericanExpress #SmallBizSat
Some of the sites you mentioned here is new to me. Thanks for sharing the informative sites.
Thanks, this is new for me, I'll check them out.
Hi Carol! Valuable information is posted. Thanks for sharing this information.
Local marketing has helped my business tremendously. Having a Google local page has helped me reach customers that are using their mobile phones to look for local painters in the Los Angeles area.
I have a Twitter list of people who follow me who're from my local market...maybe sometime I'll teach a local blogging class or something -- and now I have a ready list of who to tell about it.
Small Business Saturday I think had some success last year...hopefully it'll grow and see more participation by consumers this year. I live in a small town and I can tell you stuff like this is very big here -- there's a lot of support for keeping our small-town main street shops in business.
Specially using the FarmerFare tool for the business will be more beneficial as people can found the new product that by us and not have to spend more time in finding about the new things. And we can save the time. Thanks for sharing such nice tool information with us.
These platforms look promising; I guess many businesses underestimate the power of doing business, locally. But, what do you think of this Small Business Saturday campaigns where people are encouraged to shop locally?
Internet marketing is becoming more local. Google place pages started the trend.
I've been trying HootSuite's local twitter search for certain phrases that relate to my industry. I can even save those searches in a daily feed and strike up conversations. Who knows they might become clients someday?