UPDATE: Now you can set up beacon marketing without investing in your own app
Proximity marketing is all about marketing to your consumer at the right place, at the right time, with highly relevant and personalized notifications. It provides outstanding results for businesses in combination with the right advertising strategies and tools. Over the past year, we have seen a number of brands ranging from casinos to theme parks, opt-in to enhance their customer experience using proximity marketing technologies. Marketers across various verticals are now beginning to realize that proximity marketing offer enormous potential beyond merely delivering vouchers and coupons. These tools work best when they are used by brands to better understand the needs and wants of their customer base, as well as notable patterns in buying behaviour.
As we look to 2015, we will see more and more brands reorganizing their marketing strategies around this new technology. More importantly, as more and more proximity marketing campaigns showcase what’s on offer, there will be a huge change in consumers’ perceptions as it reinforces the trust factor by highlighting the fact that it is the consumer who truly benefits from the technology.
[Tweet “Why proximity marketing matters in 2018”]
In this post, we will discuss the basics of proximity marketing, how it works and what it holds in the future.
Proximity marketing definition
Also known as ‘hyperlocal marketing’, proximity marketing involves targeting potential consumers with personalized adverts based on how near a consumer (or device) is to a specific location and enticing them to make a purchasing decision in the immediate future.
How does it work?
BEACONS
Proximity marketing with beacons involves setting up a Bluetooth enabled mobile device at a particular spot within the range of the beacon and passing information in the form of text, images or video via the respective mobile app. There are a number of must-haves required to employ this marketing technique. They are:
1. First of all, the consumer should be using a Bluetooth-enabled mobile device at the location where the proximity marketing technique is being applied.
2. A beacon must be deployed in the area where the consumer is currently located, in order to send out and receive marketing messages or other information.
3. The targeted consumer should have downloaded the relevant mobile application and installed it on his or her phone that is capable of receiving push notifications. This can either be your own brand app which you can now create with Shoutem, a DIY app builder platform and manage its performance with Kumulos without a developer’s help. You can also use a free app, NearBee available on both iOS and Android.
[Tweet “What are the 3 must-haves for proximity marketing?”]
Again when it comes to beacon deployment there are a number of factors to consider, starting from available power arrangements to choosing the right kind of beacon. We have discussed 5 such crucial factors in one of our earlier blog posts. Once the brand deploys a beacon in the spot chosen for promotion, the communication occurs in 3 quick steps. They are:
1. Device detection: A Beacon scans for Bluetooth enabled mobile devices in its proximity range while it broadcasts its ID number (which is unique to a particular beacon in that location) at regular intervals. The proximity-aware mobile app will also carry a list of ID numbers of all the beacons that have been activated and will associate them with their location. Once the device matches a beacon’s ID with the ID held in the proximity-aware mobile app, it lets the app know that the beacon is nearby.
2. Permission request: For each Bluetooth enabled mobile device detected within the proximity range of the beacon, it will send requests to consumers seeking permission to communicate with their mobile device.
3. Content upload: Once the consumer grants permission, depending on how the app has been configured, it will then notify the consumer with an alert on the lock-screen, displaying the corresponding message. Tapping on the message opens the app, at a screen displaying personalized marketing messages including text, images, audio and video about products found at that spot chosen for the promotion or a complementary product found one aisle away.
[Tweet “How proximity marketing works”]
NFC and QR codes
Beaconstac also offers an app-less way of running proximity marketing campaigns using NFC and QR codes.
Explore NFC marketing | Create your QR codes now
NFC keycards and stickers have an added layer of QR codes on top to enable all smartphones – Android and iPhones to tap or scan them to reveal the hyper-contextual marketing campaign.
Here’s an entire list of all the phones compatible with NFC
QR codes are included in the platform plans and can be completely customized. From changing the foreground and background color to adding a logo, businesses can use dynamic QR codes allowing to re-use the same QR code to deliver different campaigns at different times of the day or week.
Explore NFC and QR code use cases here
What are the different types of proximity marketing?
There are a host of technologies are being leveraged to implement proximity marketing campaigns. Each technology has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. Before diving deeper into which technology works best for your business, let’s have a look at the most popular proximity marketing technologies –
- QR codes
- WiFi
- NFC
- Geofencing
- RFID
- BLE beacons
Here’s a detailed comparison of the proximity marketing technologies and which is best for your business
[Tweet “What 2019 holds for proximity marketing”]
A look into the future of proximity marketing!
As proximity marketing gains momentum and moves beyond trial stages, we will see brands go on to use beacons, NFC and QR codes to gather a rich collection of consumer data which in turn will enable brands to communicate better with their customers resulting in improved customer experience.
RELATED: Proximity Marketing in 2019 and forecast for 2022
[Tweet “With Bluetooth devices like Apple AirPods and Fitbit devices flooding the market, Bluetooth driven marketing is sure to drive marketing for physical stores in 2018 and beyond!”]
If you are planning to use Beacons, NFC and QR codes, take a look at Beaconstac, that includes everything you need to get started. Using Beaconstac you can set up your own campaign, without a developer’s help!
[…] Beacons by nature are designed to help with proximity marketing while RFID systems are designed to help with real-time location of […]
Interesting content about Proximity Marketing and how to use it. Proximity Marketing / Location-Based targeting is largely used for different kinds of businesses to drive conversions, enhance engagement and so on.
On the link below, a post about use of beacons in museums to enhance visitor experience, really interesting!
http://snip.ly/xivd1
[…] In simple words, beacons are small devices (approximately 3cm x 5cm x 2cm), which use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to transmit signals to smartphones within a short range. Bluetooth LE is a proximity technology and the main purpose of beacons is “proximity marketing”. […]
It is 2017 and there is a new player redefining Proximity Marketing, NO APP needed on the users phone so this breakthrough technology is perfect for local business to get started in Proximity Marketing using Google Beacon technology. http://ActiveProximityMarketing.com