As written for Business2Community
I had the pleasure of being at the Social Media Strategies Summit last week in San Francisco. The guys at GSMI do conferences well–they balance theory with case studies and practical training.
One such training session entitled “Facebook Advertising Best Practices,” was led by the co-founder of local start up with a whole lot of promise. In an online marketing world that’s seen the rise and decline of the daily deal phenomena, LocalGruv may have found an ideal service offering for local businesses. The company provides localized daily deals, okay, that’s neat, but with a considerable value add: social media promotion expertise.
To put the significance of this into context, in the last six months of 2011, 798 daily deal sites shut down, according to Daily Deal Media, which researches the industry. The daily deal space is one of few barriers to entry, but many barriers to success, as one analyst put it. LocalGruv may very well have created an “all-in-one” offering to give local business a way to tap into the power of social and the power of collective buying power at the same time.
Where the GSMI guys know conferences, the LocalGruv guys know Facebook promotion. I’m talking the type of stuff you only learn by trial and error. Things like A/B testing to know what images to use, if, when, and where to ever use Facebook advertising, and the little-known power of Facebook’s “promoted stories” feature. Because LocalGruv knows Facebook, you as the local winery in the San Francisco East Bay area, needn’t. Hook up with these guys and you get an offering something like the one below.
This is a total win for the small, local business that wants a daily deal focused more on their local community audience, and assembled by folks who sometimes already know their product first-hand. These companies now get the expertise and social media campaign management quality of an agency, for a fraction of the cost. And for the local business unsure about hosting a daily deal, the incentive of that same social media promotion gives them extra value to offset the costs of the daily deal promotion.
LocalGruv is small itself, and now only serves the aforementioned San Francisco East Bay area, but look for this service model to grow, and the company’s offerings to expand. The value for businesses is there, and metrics are showing, it works.
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