Hyperlocal Campaign Platform for Local Businesses

Customer Profile

A founding team setting out to build a hyperlocal campaign ecosystem in a single city center — a unified consumer app that aggregates restaurants, cafés and boutiques in one neighborhood-scale experience. Their thesis: pull local businesses off the Google Ads and Meta treadmill by giving them a direct, opt-in channel to nearby customers. The team brought deep marketing operations experience but needed a software partner to build the full product from scratch. The platform is live and the customer portfolio is expanding.

The Problem

A meaningful share of local-business marketing spend in Türkiye flows to Google Ads and Meta, where geographic targeting bottoms out at the city level. A user 200 meters from a café and a user 20 kilometers away cost the same to reach — local businesses pay for waste they cannot avoid. There is no off-the-shelf tooling for neighborhood-scale campaigns; bulletin boards and printed flyers remain the most targeted channels in many segments. SMS marketing is expensive (roughly 0.15-0.30 TRY per message in Türkiye) and open rates are weak. Push notifications are cheaper but, without a well-designed opt-in flow, they turn into perceived spam and users delete the app within days.

On top of that, customer data does not sit with the business — it sits inside large delivery and marketplace platforms. A café that processes 200 daily orders through these platforms typically does not have phone numbers for its own regulars. Loyalty programs are still paper punch cards: the "buy 10 coffees, get one free" campaign erodes under lost cards, forged stamps and unmeasurable ROI.

Our Solution

Over 8 months we shipped a four-layer ecosystem.

1. Business Onboarding and Admin Panel

A self-service panel for restaurants, cafés and boutiques: business profile, menu and product catalog, asset management, campaign builder, geo-fence drawing (store + 300m radius), an integration interface for popular POS systems, loyalty rule engine and an ROI dashboard. Typical onboarding time dropped to 2-3 hours — simple enough that the field team handles it from a tablet at the merchant's table.

2. Consumer App (Nearby Campaigns)

A React Native consumer app: a feed of campaigns near the user's current location, a map view (Mapbox), favorite businesses, coupon wallet, loyalty points and stamps. The spine of the app is the "nearby campaigns" tab — the platform works even when the app is closed, and when the user opens it they see "an offer that becomes relevant in the next thirty minutes."

3. Location-Based Push (Geo-fence + Opt-in Incentive)

No continuous GPS — it drains battery and pushes users away. We use iOS Significant Location Change and the Android Geofencing API, which together stay inside a 1-2% hourly battery budget. When a user enters a geo-fence defined in PostGIS, the frequency rules (max 2 pushes per day per user, max 1 push per business per 24 hours) gate whether FCM/APNs delivers anything. The onboarding opt-in rate sits above 70%, anchored by an honest value proposition — "be the first to see campaigns in your neighborhood, get a welcome discount" — rather than a dark pattern.

4. Loyalty Engine (QR Check-in + Points)

Per-business configurable loyalty: points, stamps, tiers, birthday triggers, nth-visit triggers. Businesses with POS integration get points and stamps tied directly to the sales receipt — no manual scanning. Smaller businesses without a POS use a QR-based digital receipt flow: the till generates a QR code, the customer scans it with the app, the backend verifies. A fraud layer (same-IP rapid scans, abnormal velocity, duplicate stamps) blocks abuse server-side.

Results

• System is live: active businesses across the restaurant, café and boutique categories are running on the platform; the customer portfolio is expanding
• Geo-targeted notification infrastructure is event-driven on PostGIS + iOS Significant Location Change + Android Geofencing API; battery cost stays low and the user experience is sustainable
• Opt-in flow + frequency caps are baked into the backend rule engine — the "spam perception" problem is structurally prevented
• POS integration interface ties points and stamps directly to the sales receipt — stamp forgery and coupon fraud are blocked
• Premium business subscription is live via iyzico; the freemium flow works end-to-end
• Loyalty fraud: for businesses migrating off paper stamps, forgery is technically blocked and ROI becomes measurable for the first time

The platform is live and the customer portfolio is expanding.

Why The Architecture Held Up

Three engineering decisions carried disproportionate weight. First, event-driven geo-fencing instead of continuous GPS — battery stays cheap, users do not uninstall, and the platform retains the audience the business case depends on. Second, frequency caps baked into the backend rule engine rather than the business-side UI — even a motivated business owner cannot exceed them, producing a disciplined notification rhythm that does not exhaust users. Third, POS integration was kept optional but strongly incentivized; integrated businesses unlock real ROI dashboards and fraud-protected loyalty, so the upgrade path feels earned rather than gated.