Location based marketing within your social networks and applications provide your dealership an excellent opportunity to promote itself and your service department. With geo-based apps gaining an enormous amount of headway, it's important that your dealership use them to help promote your various marketing campaigns and departments. 

Location based networks like Foursquare, Gowalla, and SCVNGR are great avenues to achieve these types of promotions.  Let's start with Foursquare and discuss 3 simple steps that your dealership can do to promote its service department's current specials and coupons.

Step 1 - Claim your venue (Dealership) - Head to foursquare.com and claim your dealership by searching for it in the upper right hand corner. Then, click your venue and simply follow the instructions to claim your dealership and you'll be on your way to setting up specials.

Step 2 - Head to your venue and create your first specials. You can create this based on simple check-ins, a set number of check-ins, or mayor-ships. This is great way to provide your visitors ADDED value for your service department or sales incentives. Add a current service coupon and get started… But remember, you'll want to add more savings to provide your visitors with an additional and exclusive incentive to check in.

Step 3 - Promote It! Utilize P.O.S materials in the service or sales departments that encourage your walk-in traffic or customers to check in. Make sure they are aware that they will be able to get something of value, just for checking in! Also, promote it on your Facebook page and website. This will let your other social databases be aware of these customized savings!

So those are a few simple steps that can get you started with customizing some of your location based marketing efforts at your dealership. In no way are these campaigns limited to service coupons and incentives… and you can have fun by setting up treks on SCVNGR and trips on Gowalla. This will let you tie in a series of events that people can do in order to get certain things in return. It's a locational scavenger hunt and a lot of the manufacturers have been utilizing these apps to create fun games and treks for mobile users (Nissan, Mazda, Buick, and more).

Take some time to set up these networks so you can customize these options. It will definitely increase your social networking and location based marketing stamp, but also allow you to communicate with car buyers on a more personal and fun level! Plus, it keeps your dealership on the cutting edge of location based technology. So start checking-in today!