Beacon Marketing: The Way Local Business Will Thrive Today, Tomorrow, and Beyond

Casey Markee, founder of Media Wyze, gave a presentation at the Rocks Digital Social Media Day Conference held in Addison, TX explaining the importance of understanding how beacons can greatly enhance how local businesses can improve their connection with their customer base both online and offline.

What Are Beacons And How Do They Work?

A simple way to look at it – a beacon is an electronic device that is used to send out a signal which is read by an app (mobile or desktop) that performs a specific function depending upon the information relayed to the beacon by the signal.

One example of how this signal could be used is making suggestions to pedestrians as they walk by a restaurant. Let's imagine that the pedestrian installed a mobile app on their smartphone that lets them know when Italian restaurants have special offers for their food items. An Italian restaurant can set up a beacon so that when that person walks by, a signal is sent out to activate a monitor that displays the specials the restaurant has.

Even better, the app can read what time it is so that the monitor knows whether or not to show lunch specials, or dinner specials. Plus, for another pedestrian that also has the app, but has noted she prefers Chinese food, no ads from the Italian restaurant would be displayed to that person.

This is VERY powerful stuff because beacons help you to optimize your marketing to take full advantage of micro moments!

Micro moments are those situations that only occur for a short period of time that may or may not have a major impact on your life. Going back to the above example. People walking down the street past various restaurants may be interested in finding a great Italian place to eat, but not finding one is not going to greatly affect that person (they can eat another type of food). This is why being ready to showcase your specials for Italian food is very important since you only have a small window of opportunity to capture the person's attention and interest before they settle for something else.

As far as technology goes, one of the best features about beacons is that they can be used with a program called Google Eddystone.

Eddystone is an open source beacon format developed by Google in 2015 that works with Android, but is also iOS friendly.

Some of the many features of Eddystone include:

Supports URL and App for messaging

Open-Source (available on GitHub)

Can send messages through UUID (Universal Unique Identifier), URL or Telemetry

Uses EIDs (Ephemeral Identifiers) for secure tracking

This is all well and good, but ultimately we have to look at some important reasons why you would want employ beacons in your business model:

1. Beacon marketing campaigns help increase the likelihood of someone making a purchase

2. Persuades shoppers to do more holiday shopping while at the store

3. Influences shoppers to visit a store more often, and SPEND MORE MONEY!!!

Beacons are already being used by hotel guests to check in, and car rental establishments to help with patrons choosing their rental cars. It is not a matter of when this technology will be adopted – it already has.

The easiest way to get started is with the Beaconstac Starter Kit. Some of the features of this kit includes:

Comes with 3 enterprise-grade BLE Sensoro beacons

Supports BOTH iBeacon & Eddystone

Each beacon can cover up to 50ft and last up to 4 years.

The longer the distance, the shorter the battery life.

Create a Campaign directly from the app in 15 Minutes!

Go to store.beaconstac.com and use promo code CASEY10 to get 10% off!