Why Use Beacons?
If you want to understand and engage your app users on a very small scale, for example in a certain aisle of your store, around a painting in a museum or next to a specific check-in gate at an airport, beacons are the things you need. Our platform can help set up clever beacons campaigns on scale and easily manage them.
What are beacons?
A beacon is like a small digital lighthouse: it broadcasts a signal advertising “I am here and my ID is…”. It allows a bluetooth-based device (such as a smartphone) to receive these time-static pieces of data within short distances. For instance, inside a store or other kinds of buildings.
Beacons can trigger different behavior inside an app such as a push notification. There are also a number of other use cases with beacons, for example: home automation, children’s games and exhibit information at a museum.
The iBeacon is the most well known Beacon device which was developed by Apple and introduced in 2013.
Successful use cases with beacons
Beacons have been successfully deployed in the retail, hospitality, travel, entertainment, education, and advertising industries. There are also interesting case studies for Beacons being used for corporate or personal use.
Beacons in the retail industry have been used to understand shopping patterns and how long customers stay in a certain place. Civico, a Plot Projects customer used Beacons to measure how long people stayed in shopping malls, using the beacon to trigger smartphones as they entered the vicinity and when they exited to calculate the difference in time.
How much do beacons cost?
Though there is no fixed answer as to how much beacons cost, here are 3 key components that determine the price of a beacon campaign:
- Mobile app (belonging to you or 3rd party) that you will use as a channel to engage with your customers (it’s possible to do it without one, but it would involve serious limitations)
- Actual beacon hardware that you will need to purchase, install and maintain (replace batteries). The hardware prices ranges from 5 to 50 dollars per piece.
- Software program and online platform (such as Plot Plugin & Dashboard) to set up and manage sophisticated campaigns on scale
For more information, check out 6 Dangerous Beacon Myths That You Should Know About Before Investing Into Them before you put your beacons up all over town.
Can Beacons & Geofencing work together?
Spoiler alert – they can. Geofencing and beacons are both technologies that can be used for location-based marketing and can complement each other. However, it is important to understand the similarities of and the differences between these technologies to be able to make the best use of them.
Combining forces: beacons & Plot Projects
Plot Projects enables you to set up your beacon campaigns via the Plot online dashboard, the same place where you create your geofences. Beacons can also be used in conjunction with geofences, enabling you to set up a sophisticated marketing campaign if required. For example:
- Collect micro-location insights, such as foot traffic to a certain aisle or section of your store
- Engage your app users with notifications, for example when walking into your business location
Want to brush up on beacons?
That’s where we can help! The Plot Projects team have painstakingly put together The Ultimate Guide To Geofencing For Mobile Marketing, where we answer all the questions about beacons and geofencing that you were too afraid to ask.
