Common Location-Based Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Foursquare’s March 2009 launch put location-based marketing in front of small business owners for the first time as something they might try, not just read about. A handful of early adopters, mostly bars, coffee shops and independent retailers in cities with concentrated tech-savvy populations, jumped in fast. Many of them made avoidable mistakes because the playbook simply didn’t exist yet. Here’s what tripped businesses up, and how to sidestep the same errors.

Mistake: treating it like a mass-reach channel. Foursquare’s total user base in mid-2009 was small and concentrated in a handful of cities. Businesses that budgeted for it like a channel that would reach their whole customer base were disappointed by the numbers and often gave up entirely. The fix is to size expectations to the actual audience: a location-based campaign that year was a way to deepen engagement with a narrow, enthusiastic slice of customers, not a way to reach the mass market.

Mistake: offering a discount too small to matter, or too complicated to explain. Some businesses offered check-in discounts of a few percent, which barely registered as an incentive once weighed against the friction of explaining what checking in even meant to a customer who’d never used the app. The fix is to make the reward disproportionately generous relative to how few people will redeem it, since the total volume is low, and to keep the mechanic to one sentence a cashier can say out loud.

Mistake: ignoring venue claiming and letting the listing go stale. A location could exist on Foursquare, created automatically from check-ins, without the business ever claiming it. That meant wrong hours, no description and no ability to run any kind of offer. The fix is simple: claim the venue, keep the details current and treat it the way you’d treat any other listing a customer might check before walking in.

Mistake: focusing on the mayor mechanic without a plan for what happens after someone wins. Several businesses set up a mayorship reward, then never followed through consistently, staff didn’t know who the current mayor was, or the promised perk quietly stopped being honored. That kind of inconsistency undid the goodwill the mechanic was supposed to build. The fix is to keep the reward simple enough that staff can track it without a system, a punch card behind the register works fine.

Mistake: assuming every business needs a location-based presence in 2009. A business with no walk-in component, or one serving a customer base that skewed older and less likely to have downloaded a niche app yet, gained little from investing time here this early. The fix is honest self-assessment: if your customers aren’t the type currently on Foursquare, your time was better spent on channels where they were, and revisiting location-based marketing once adoption broadened made more sense.

Mistake: measuring the wrong thing. A few businesses judged the experiment a failure because it didn’t produce a spike in overall revenue within a month. That’s the wrong yardstick for a channel this early and this niche. The fix is to measure what it delivers at this stage: repeat visits from a specific engaged group, and word of mouth from people willing to talk about a small, novel experience.

The businesses that got the most out of location-based marketing in 2009 treated it as a cheap, low-stakes experiment aimed at a narrow audience, not a new marketing department. That framing kept expectations realistic and made the actual, modest wins feel like wins instead of disappointments.

---

Keep exploring: browse more Marketing Strategy guides, see everything we published in 2009 or check out the Digital Business Marketing Awards.