Creating a Beacon Campaign for your Cinemas

In their efforts to boost customer loyalty programs by turning a one-time ticket buyer into a repeat buyer, cinemas and movie theater chains, of recent, have been constantly looking to leverage hyperlocal mobile technology. And no other business set up can provide entertainment brands and film studios with as huge an opportunity to do the same, than malls.

According to a recent study, mall shoppers are five times more likely to be moviegoers than non-mall shoppers, and when people view a movie trailer they are three times more likely to go to see that movie. And with iBeacon technology, entertainment marketers can now make the most of this spike in interest among mall shoppers by leveraging beacons to deliver location-based offers.

In this post, we will talk about how you can easily create a campaign using Beaconstac to drive ticket sales among mall shoppers with just a few beacons.

To get started with your beacon pilot, you can 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!

Campaign Objective:

Let’s set up a campaign that sends out a movie trailer along with a 15% discount on movie tickets for the 1.30 pm show, to mall shoppers. This offer will be sent out to mall shoppers who pass by the entrance, escalators and food court, from 1.10 pm to 1.30 pm (i.e 20 minute duration before the 1.30 pm show).

Step 1: Add Beacons to the dashboard and install them in your mall

Before we begin, the first thing to do is to purchase beacons. For a standard mall, we’d recommend you to deploy at least 25 – 30 beacons to get maximum coverage. Once you have your beacons in place, add their details including UUID, major and minor numbers (as shown in the screen below) to the Beaconstac dashboard.

When it comes to use cases that employ several beacons, Beaconstac even allows you to import all of the beacon IDs into the dashboard automatically. Another important thing to note here is that, naming your beacons accurately will also help you identify them with ease.

For the purpose of this campaign, we are using five beacons that are positioned at the high-traffic areas in the mall. And for the sake of simplicity, let’s name them after their locations: ‘East Entrance’, ‘West Entrance’, ‘Escalator Floor 1’, Escalator Floor 2’ and ‘Food Court’. Once you have added the beacon details, they are ready to be installed.

Step 2: Create a Tag

The Beaconstac ‘Tags’ feature makes it easy to assign the same set of rules/actions to multiple beacons. All you have to do is, go to the Tags section, click ‘Add a new Tag’ in the upper right corner, and enter its name. For the purpose of this campaign, we will name our Tag as ‘Cinema Offers’.

And to tag each of the five beacons deployed across the mall with this particular tag name, you will have to go to the Beacons section, click on each Beacon that you want to be tagged and type in ‘Cinema Offers’ in the space provided for Tags.

Step 3: Create cards

Next, we’ll create a card for the discount offer that the mall shopper will see on his or her device. Cards are basically creatives that show up as a notification on the user’s mobile phone when certain conditions are met. Beaconstac offers several types of cards such as Summary, Photo, Media, etc.

For this campaign, we will create a Media card titled ‘‘15% off on Movie Tickets’ since it allows you to add a video (in this case a movie trailer) in addition to the offer.

Step 4: Add Rules

After this, all we have to do is create a rule for the beacons so that they trigger the offer when mall shoppers are in their proximity for 30 seconds or more. To ensure that these custom rules are applied to all beacons with the ‘Cinema Offers’ Tag instead of a single beacon, make sure you go to the ‘Tags’ tab under the Rules section and add the ‘Cinema Offers’ Tag in the space provided for Tags.

Step 5: Create Custom Attributes

Next, we need to add a custom attribute which will determine in what timeframe will your mall shoppers receive this offer. Custom attributes can be used to filter users based on criteria such as number of visits, previous purchase history, etc.

Here we are creating just one custom attribute called ‘Time of the day’. This will ensure that only those mall shoppers who pass by the beacons within the given time frame of 1.10 pm to 1.30 pm receive this offer .

Step 5: Set Actions

After this, we’ll add the action to be triggered when the rule is true. Here, the action is to trigger the ‘15% off on Movie Tickets’ card we created.

Once you’ve correctly set up your Rules/Actions and assigned them to your beacons via Tags, make sure that the rule is set as ‘Active’ in the list of rules.

And we’re all set! Mall shoppers who happen to walk by the beacon deployed areas in the mall and meet the criteria set in the campaign will see the following screen on their device.

Do try this out and let me know your thoughts about this campaign. If there a specific campaign you would like to read about, I’ll be more than happy to share how you can get it done using Beaconstac.

If you are planning a beacon pilot, 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!