Right now you can’t go anywhere without hearing something about the new trending game of Pokèmon Go. Walk around a park or a busy plaza and you’ll see large groups of people standing around each other, looking down at their phones. Many of us have already heard the horror stories that go along with the new craze. However, many businesses have seen some incredibly jumps in foot traffic from the game.
The Huffington Post recently posted an article describing an ice cream shop that was struggling to bring in new business. The shop found itself the center of multiple ‘gyms’, areas of importance in the game. This resulted in traffic to the business nearly tripling on some evenings.
What does this mean for your business?
The game is all based your location and uses your device to find where you are. Using this information you wander around looking for upgrades within the game. What this means for a business is if you are centrally located around these gaming points, people will trickle through trying to complete parts of the game. Now not all businesses are Pokèmon Go gyms or PokèStops, but often these are located around popular areas. Some of the popular areas include churches, parks, museums, and public buildings.
Begin researching the gyms and stops near your business, once you have located the stops near you, tell your clients. Create a blog post about a PokèStops or gym within your city or township. Use your location (i.e Tempe, AZ) within the post to target that keyword and location. You can even create a map of stops within a certain area and highlight your business on the map, letting users know what else is around.
Like any content you’re adding to your site make sure to have it well-written, some great images, and a Google embedded map would be helpful. Remember, Google wants to see high quality content. Don’t forget to share the post on your social media to remind followers you are near a gym or stop. Even if many of your followers are not playing the game, it’s important to keep users engaged. Within these posts you can even offer a discount to users, giving them extra incentives to stop in.
Now you’ve given people a reason to come explore the area around your business along with increasing your search visibility by adding new content and utilizing keywords within the content. Your business can even take it to another level and begin creating specialized services or products aimed at these clients. If you’re a coffee shop, create a specialized drink that’s for Pokèmon Masters. The ideas are endless.
Pokèmon Go is the latest in this location-based augmented reality game and after the success the game has had we can expect to see more like it emerge. It may be too early to determine how much success these games will have, but we will surely see similar ones in the future.