Pokémon Go Marketing Tips

If Pokémon Go has launched in your country, you have likely seen lots of young people (and not so young) rushing around town capturing game characters with their smart phones. With all this activity, you are probably thinking, “How can my business benefit from the Pokémon Go craze?” Here are some Pokémon Go marketing tips we’ve put together to help you.

What is Pokémon Go?

Quite simply, Pokémon Go is an augmented reality game based on the popular Pokémon card game. Players download an app so their smart phone and the app tells them when there are game characters nearby. The creatures show up based on the phone’s GPS so people will find different characters as they travel.

The app uses the phone camera to make it look like the creature is there in real life (see screenshot). Then the players “capture” the character to use later in contests against other players. So the game is a combination of collecting and playing with others.

While this is not the first example of augmented reality, Pokémon Go’s popularity is massively larger than any previous attempt to bring augmented reality to life.

Young people and their families are out exploring their local area and new areas they travel to like never before because of the game.

Can My Business Benefit from Pokémon Go Marketing Tips?

The first question to answer is whether or not Pokémon Go marketing would be of benefit to your business. Let’s look at what businesses this might work well for and what businesses would probably not benefit.

The typical player is young so attracting Pokémon Go players works for your business when some of these are true for you:

• You are primarily retail
• Your target customers are youth and families
• You have products or services of interest to youth and families
• You have products or services that can be adapted to the game

Pokémon Go is probably not useful to your business if:

• your clientele is older or primarily business people
• you are an office environment rather than retail
• hordes of young people traipsing through your business would bother your other customers

So a family restaurant might welcome players while a high end dining establishment would find it disruptive.  Some businesses that might benefit include:

• family restaurants
• toy stores
• children’s book stores
• museums
• ice cream parlors
• sports stores
• bike shops
• kids clothing stores
• shopping malls
• theaters
• family entertainment attractions
• anywhere where families and kids can shop, eat, have fun or relax

Create Pokémon Go Digital Signage

Once you’ve decided that you would like to attract players, the first step is to let players know you are a Pokémon Go – friendly site.  The best way to do this is to create Pokémon Go digital signage by adding Pokémon Go advertising, playing tips and information to the digital signage at your location.

You can easily create the signage on any computer and TV monitor by using a combination of PowerPoint (to design your sign) and iPoint to create your advertising playlists and schedule them.

Here are some Pokémon Go marketing tips as to what to add to your digital signage:

1. Advertise “Wanted” Posters of Pokémons that can be found in your shop. Ask if your visitors captured all of them. Offer a coupon, discount or free item if they have successfully collected the characters in your establishment.
2. Offer Pokémon – related products – Do you have products that could be created or adapted to be interesting to Pokémon Go players? For example, a bakery could do Pokémon character cupcakes or cookies. Perhaps a free one if people tweet their location as your bakery.
3. Pokémon events – you can do themed events relating to the game to attract people
4. Set “Lures” – You can purchase in-game “lures”. When you activate a lure, it attracts more powerful and rare game creatures to the area. This also attracts more players coming to collect these rarer and more powerful characters. Show a PowerPoint countdown timer on your digital screen showing when a lure will become active. This will bring people back during lure time. You can use a tool called Dynamic Time for this along with PowerPoint.
5. Do timed advertising for after school crowd. If your crowd consists of seniors in the morning and kids after school, you can schedule senior’s specials in the morning and Pokémon Go after school.

The tools you can use to create this include:

1. PowerPoint: to create digital signage and display on any TV screen or monitor
2. iPoint: to schedule and display your advertising and playlists. iPoint can show your digital restaurant menu and then periodically show the Pokémon Go ads so you can show them on your existing screens
3. Dynamic Time: to show a countdown timer until lures are active or events start

Eventually the game developer, Niantic will likely develop additional methods to market, such as paying to become a Pokémon Stop or Gym. But these marketing tips provided here are ones you can implement immediately.