As the industry leader for all things geospatial, Foursquare deeply understands locations. Not just the major chains, the McDonalds and Walmarts of the world. We understand independent small businesses, from Joe’s coffee shop to Cathy’s barber shop to Bob’s burger joint. And that’s no easy feat, considering that there are roughly 33.3 million small businesses in total across the country, making up 99.9% of all U.S. businesses.
Discovering these small businesses and keeping their information up-to-date is a challenging problem, due to their ever-changing nature. While almost 5.5 million new business applications were filed in the U.S. last year, 18% of small businesses don’t last to the end of their first year, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labour Statistics.
Building and maintaining a dataset that tracks all these independent businesses as they open, move, and close is extremely difficult and time-consuming. But after 15+ years of perfecting our best-in-class location technology, we have it down to a science.
How Foursquare understands small businesses
Foursquare has spent 15+ years digitizing real world points of interest. Foursquare’s Places Engine powers continuous calibration into our Places dataset to rapidly implement real-world changes, delivering the most up-to-date POI dataset possible in this ever-changing physical world. Our proprietary technology leverages advanced AI and machine learning algorithms to synthesize vast amounts of data from 16B+ check-ins from our consumer-facing apps, combined with authoritative third-party sources, web crawls, and multiple other programmatic sources. This AI-driven data is then validated by our Superuser community, ensuring the dataset reflects ground truth with rich detail and high precision.
So how can our understanding of small businesses propel your business forward? Let’s dive in.
How understanding mom & pops benefits your business
Whether you’re a retailer, a consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand, a financial services company, a hotel or an auto brand, a deep understanding of mom & pop shops can provide you with a competitive advantage.
Imagine how businesses across sectors can benefit.
- A mobility app can help end users navigate to small businesses with ease, delivering a seamless user experience.
- A hotel can recommend top-rated small businesses to travelers within their app to drive engagement, helping users live like a local.
- A financial services company can enrich their data about transactions at mom & pop shops, or build a targeted marketing campaign around a tentpole like Small Business Saturday, promoting shopping locally in real-time when people are in a shopping district.
- A beverage brand can segment and reach consumers who visit different types of independent bars and nightlife venues where a new product is being distributed, enticing them to try the latest offering. Savvy marketers can even tailor their messaging to resonate better with beer garden enthusiasts, versus wine bar visitors or nightclub fans.
- Auto manufacturers can connect with people who are likely to be in-market auto intenders because they’ve visited independent auto shops, signaling a need for maintenance and repairs.
- A CPG brand launching a new healthy snack can reach fitness fans who frequent local gyms or connect with consumers in real time when they’re near a point of sale.
- An instant coffee brand or a coffee maker label could reach coffee lovers who frequent independent coffee shops.
Keeping track of mom & pop locations is also critically important when it comes to measuring the impact of your efforts. For instance, omnichannel measurement solutions like Attribution can help CPG brands assess how their advertising affects visitation to independent points of sale.
With granular insights into which creative, channels, and targeting strategies are driving lift, CPG marketers can unlock areas of opportunity and optimize campaigns in flight to maximize ROI. For instance, consider how an alcohol brand can measure whether TV ads drive consumers to visit bars and nightlife venues where they sell a certain product.
The trusted source of location intelligence
Foursquare is widely known as the #1 go-to resource for all things geospatial. So when Entrepreneur, the leading publication around entrepreneurship and small business, set out to create a list of ‘America’s Favorite Mom & Pop Shops ™’, they turned to us to power the list. Curious about who made the cut this year? Check it out here.
