Mobile applications have opened several new doors for restaurant operators looking to extend their reach, but technological advancements over the past two years have left many in the industry trying to catch up to what new mobile marketing opportunities have to offer.
"Mobile marketing is very much of a wild west right now," said Bryce Marshall, director of Strategic Services at Akron, Ohio-based Knotice. "There's been so much advancement in mobile devices just in the last two years in terms of technology that's available. And they are morphing very quickly. I don't think there's an established game plan for success."
While Foursquare and others easily and inexpensively tap into the native ability of smartphone devices to actively identify the location of a user, geolocation capabilities extend far beyond a user's ability to ‘check in.'
For example, if a user is in a new city or wants to research restaurants in a specific area, their cell phone browser, based on the users location, has the ability pull that information.
"Google is going to recognize this search is coming from a mobile device and they're going to search (for nearby restaurants) based on that," Marshall said. "Also, that person is looking for information based on where they are, a sea (of) change from someone searching from the computer at their desk. With that assumption in mind, that's how Google can filter results based on a physical location."
Restaurant operators also now have the ability to tailor mobile marketing campaigns based on daily weather forecasts and behavioral patterns.
Burlingame, Calif.-based Brightkite has handled targeted mobile media campaigns for companies such as Pantene, CoverGirl, Diet Coke and Big O tires.
For Diet Coke — and through a partnership with a weather company — Brightkite was able to target consumers on days when the afternoon temperature exceeded 75 degrees. For Big-O, campaigns were created for days with heavy ice or rain.
"Restaurants have a dynamic way to attract and steer traffic in a local sense they haven't had before," said Rob Lawson, Brightkite's chief marketing officer. "It's very local and it's very immediate."
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| According to Brightkite's April 2009 Mobile Advertising Report:
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Augmented reality
There's also augmented reality, a combination of the physical world viewed through a smartphone camera lens with a digital data-centric overlay.
Companies such as Starbucks and McDonald's are working with Brightkite on augmented reality campaigns, which have the ability to provide new opportunities for them to attract and gain consumers. Additionally, consumer restaurant review sites such as Yelp and Urbanspoon had augmented reality apps for sale in 2009.
The Yelp app's feature, called Monocle, displays onto a live camera icons of Yelp-reviewed establishments. The icons reveal where the restaurants are and proximity to a consumer's location. It also was one of the first iPhone apps to use that style of augmented reality. In comparison, the AR app on Urbanspoon can display restaurants as bright circles with smaller sized circles representing those in farther distance. Each circle contains a percentage of how many app users "liked" that particular restaurant, with the more liked restaurants appearing a deep orange and less liked restaurants fading into shades of gray.
But as relatively new and unique as the augmented reality apps are, there is a downside.
For example, many applications enabling augmented-reality platforms are not available for Blackberry devices.
"The trick with geolocation and augmented reality is we're talking about a small proportion of the overall universe," Knotice's Marshall said. "If, optimistically, 10 percent of day-to-day consumers in the United States have a smartphone device that unlocks these technologies, how can fast casual marketers tap into the other 90 percent? Text is going to be key."
Text messaging and customer loyalty
Text messaging isn't a new mobile marketing platform, but it is still a solid way for marketers to reach that portion of U.S. consumers.
According to Brightkite's April 2009 Mobile Advertising Report, 81 percent of iPhone users and nearly 66 percent of non-iPhone users used text messaging on their cell phones in the first quarter of 2009, up from 54 percent a year ago.
For restaurants, those cell phone numbers can be used to create and propel customer loyalty programs, which a majority of operators already have in place.
"The mobile phone number can be the key for loyalty programs," said Peter Wolf, chief marketing officer for ParTech Inc. "It is unique to the individual, transportable and addressable in real time. But anything on the mobile phone has to be opt in. As soon as a company abuses that – and you know someone will – that's when the government will get involved."
Using a cell phone number for loyalty purposes also holds another huge opportunity for local marketing efforts. (Read also, Linking Customer Loyalty with Social Networking in the New York Times)
"Consumers may have loyalty to a chain, but more often than not, it's specific to a store in the chain," Marshall said.
And for restaurant marketers unsure about which mobile marketing road to take, "just get in the game," Marshall said. "That's the only way marketers are going to understand what's going to work for them and what's not."
* Photo by Ricky Romero
