What Is Bluetooth Marketing?
Bluetooth marketing is one of the least understood but most powerful marketing tools available to any twenty-first-century enterprise. The business world is more competitive than ever, and getting your message heard over the noise of the competition needs you to take advantage of every available technology. Done well, Bluetooth marketing can get your business’s UVP (unique value proposition) across to your customers in a way that cuts through the noise and gives your business the edge.
How Does Bluetooth Marketing Work?
Bluetooth marketing works best as proximity marketing. Proximity marketing is a location- and time-specific strategy. It allows you to deliver targeted and personalized marketing messages to individuals who sign up to your service, delivered to mobile applications via a transmitter and software called a “beacon.”
It’s being used by retailers, in hospitality and tourism, financial institutions, and the entertainment industry, to name a few. Any business with a physical presence can make use of Bluetooth and beacon technology to deepen engagement, boost loyalty and conversions, and drive sales. So, how does it work?
1. You install one or more beacons in your store, office, or facility. You upload content. As customers come in range, the beacon triggers the application on your target’s mobile device and delivers the content.
2. Your customer, browsing the store or using the facility with a Bluetooth enabled mobile device, receives messages. The messages are delivered via an application the customer has downloaded. The application opens automatically as it detects the signal.
3. The customer receives relevant, interesting, useful, targeted content in real time. This can be a “one off message” such as an offer on the products in front of the customer, a step-by-step guide through a process, or a CTA (call-to-action) such as a purchase or subscription, or a reward such as a discount or gift voucher.
Bluetooth Marketing, Data, and Analytics
One of the most powerful aspects of Bluetooth marketing is the wealth of detailed, customer-specific data it generates and the power this delivers to target and personalize messages. You can know who visits your store, how often, which departments they visit, which products they buy, how long they spend carrying out certain actions, their average spend, and much more. You can analyze this data to help understand your customers’ needs, refine your marketing strategies, and even make informed changes to your in-store design and product ranges. It’s powerful stuff.
How Much Does It Cost to Set Up a Bluetooth Marketing Campaign?
Many marketing strategies are both time-consuming and expensive. But Bluetooth isn’t one of them. For only a couple hundred dollars you can install three or four beacon transmitters linked up to your mobile application and core CMS (content management system). Whichever way you look at it, it’s affordable, and almost guarantees a good return on your investment.
The Future of Bluetooth Marketing
Bluetooth marketing is still a new idea. But as the technology becomes more widespread, now is the time to use it to put your business ahead of the game. Many indicators suggest that more market groups are turning to Bluetooth connectivity as their first-choice method to access digital products and services and stay in touch. The increasing sales figures of paired Bluetooth devices is testimony to the direction of travel.
But getting the technology in place to take advantage of the rise in Bluetooth usage is only one step. The core principles of any successful marketing campaign remain essential. So, researching the market, testing messages, developing content, and designing advertisements, are all as much important aspects of a Bluetooth campaign as any other. But that’s a good thing, as you already have basic marketing processes in place and once you’re up-and-running, the feedback and data you get from the Bluetooth technology only helps you refine your marketing further.
With the ease and low cost of setting up the infrastructure, there are few barriers to adopting Bluetooth technology and integrating it into your marketing strategy. With Bluetooth, you can give your customers a satisfying, engaging and personalized consumer experience while your marketing team get access to a quantity and quality of data undreamed of. Not to mention increased sales and profits. If you shrug Bluetooth marketing off, your business could miss a trick.
