Beacon technology is a popular topic within the local marketing and advertising space these days. The “early days” narrative is fairly commonplace, however panelists at LSA16 provided some real-world ways beacons can support SMBs today.
Raj Nijjer of Yext and John Mazur of Belly talked about how beacons and other location analytics can impact the small business market as well as some of the friction points standing in the way. Two ways SMBs can start using beacons in a meaningful way is via retargeting and insight from store visit data and analytics.
As it relates to targeting, Raj discussed the opportunity beacons provides in retargeting customers on Facebook. How this works is with Yext’s Xone is someone would walk into a store and if they have a particular app featured in Yext’s network, Yext would record an abstract identifier and that visit would be recorded. The SMB could then take that audience of store visitors and upload them into Facebook for targeting.
From the customer loyalty perspective, John shared a real world experience he had via the Belly App. He said he walked past a store with Belly’s beacon solution and was pushed a notification, saying that if he checked into the store he could get a free cupcake. He did in fact claim the offer.
More fundamentally, the ability to track store visits and store traffic is an extremely valuable form of data any SMB should be interested in. The key thing for beacons is that they can be used to deepen relationships with existing customers and help SMBs build audiences of people actually coming to their stores.
