Beacon Placement Best Practices
An Engaging, Revenue Generating Solution
Beacons are predicted to be fundamental to the revenue growth strategy of companies looking to drive unique and engaging experiences offline. As a recent CMO article discusses, Tony Fross, VP of the Digital Advisory Service at Capgemini Consulting, states: “Beacons are the most powerful weapon in the marketing arsenal for understanding consumers in the physical world. They should be in every marketing leader’s toolkit.”
Surely, you (as a buyer) already know this and have spent months considering the positive impact that beacons and other location-sensing solutions can have on your business – increase in-store purchases, app downloads, and conversion rates along with the ability to understand the real-world path to purchase like never before. However, outside of determining what beacon solution you want to utilize, it’s important to put yourself in the shoes of your customer so your beacon deployment can be appropriate to the use cases you foresee. Once you’ve done this, where you place your beacons will become clear and you will avoid the common misstep of placing your beacons in ineffective locations.
Placement Based on Use Case
As innovators and leaders in the location space, we work closely with our clients to ensure that beacon placement is appropriate to support the ideal experience throughout the customer’s journey. First, there are some general tips that those deploying need to understand. It’s important to think about where the experience will begin from a physical location perspective. If your plan is to address potential customers walking by your store, as well as those visiting your store, you will want to plan for this in your beacon placement strategy. One of the unique capabilities of our beacons and overall platform is that a single beacon can be used for different places within the physical world and to segment accordingly.
Now that you’ve defined the ideal customer experience within your physical world, it’s important to consider scale and efficiency. Cost efficiency, time constraints, complexity of use your use cases all matter when it comes to deciding whether you will need a skilled install or whether you already have the staff and resources to do it yourself. For example, if you have common small store footprints, this may be something that store managers can handle with minimal direction; however, if you are looking to instrument a stadium, a staff of personnel may be required. If additional staff is required, budgeting must also be augmented to fit this additional cost.
Set Your Program Up for Success
Another thing to consider, aside from the logistics of implementation, are the success metrics around your beacon use cases and the data required to understand ‘success.’ Focus on your business objectives, rather than how many beacons you ultimately deploy. You can learn more about that, here.
Better understanding path-to-purchase (path analysis), where your users spend most of their time and for how long, along with unique visitor counts are all metrics that Gimbal provides, along with easy integrations into other important business systems, like your analytics provider, to prove beacon value and tie it to the metrics that matter most for your business. After all, without proof of success, beacons are nothing more then a proof of concept.
Have more in-depth questions regarding a current or potential use cases of your own? Feel free to reach out to our team of experts and we will help you get started.