Why You Should Use Beacons

Posted on by Robert Hanczor

In retail, beacons are already taking the shopping experience by storm with brands like Macy’s and Lord & Taylor taking the plunge in the past year. In fact, BLE beacons are proliferating at a great rate, with ABI Research estimating the beacon hardware market at nearly 60 million units by 2019. While retail has taken the lead in adoption, places like airports, hotels, and sports venues are all beginning to use beacons to improve the customer experience.

Leveling the playing field

Retails using beacon technology can draw in customers who may just be window shopping.
Retailers using beacon technology can draw in customers who may just be window shopping.

While it’s clear big players are already benefiting from beacon implementation, one might wonder how smaller shops with fewer resources can take advantage of this technology. Smaller shops may not have the same square footage as a large retailer to catch the attention of a shopper walking down the street, but beacons are actually helping to level this playing field. From mom and pop boutiques, to food trucks and seasonal pop-up shops leveraging hybrid online/offline-business models, beacons can expand a small business’ physical footprint without adding any additional walls.

In a traditional large retail setting, beacons deliver contextually relevant content to a user’s beacon-enabled device. For small businesses, that means delivering messages to potential patrons nearby who may be just out of view. As beacons have a range of up to 70 meters, they can be used to engage walk-by traffic a distance away from the actual storefront. For a food truck that might be in a different location every afternoon, beacons could make the difference between being undiscovered, to selling out of their lunch special before 1 p.m. from an increase in hyper-local awareness.

From ideation to action

Take this pilot program launched in Stockholm, Sweden, which deployed beacon messages from a soup truck. The beacons, which allowed the food truck to connect with patrons after they had bought their soup, enabled the truck to effectively expand its reach and improve its connection with customers via beacons—without a large or set physical or digital presence.

Another benefit for small businesses? Beacons are a low-cost, easy to use, technology that businesses with temporary or minimal physical presences can easily adopt. They’re also transportable, which allows businesses to take them anywhere they go if they’re following a pop-up or mobile vendor strategy.

Beacons also give the shop owner more square footage for their buck, by showing the availability of more merchandise not physically on display by distributing content and information via beacons. For instance, an online fashion retailer could maximize the limited shelf space to show off top selling items, while highlighting additional inventory (such as additional color choices, or size availability) via beacon.

Catching on with hybrid businesses

For businesses of any size, the incentives for beacon adoption are clear: opportunities for increased customer engagement, marketing insights, increases in sales and more. And, if current results from beacon pilot programs at major brick-and-mortar businesses are any indication, there’s incredible upside for non-traditional businesses. For example, beacons proved to be the ultimate engagement tool in 17 McDonald’s franchise locations in Columbus, GA. The beacons enabled McDonald’s to cater to customers’ tastes, preferences and behaviors, resulting in more value and enjoyment in the dining experience as well as increased sales of the McChicken sandwich and McNuggets. While this is an example of a larger retailer, non-traditional and hybrid businesses can easily imitate what McDonald’s and others are doing; beacons take just minutes to set up, and require no technical expertise to program.

Overall, small businesses have a great opportunity to experiment with beacons. Because of their flexibility in physical locations (trucks, stands, pop-ups) and agility to quickly shift strategy, these businesses have clear incentives to experiment with beacon technology and surface novel ways of leveraging the technology. With a low barrier to entry, and ability to change messages from one location to the next, the possibilities for beacons are only limited by a business’s imagination.
Robert Hanczor is CEO of Piper. He can be reached at [email protected].

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