Why You Should Be Using Beacon Technology

What is beacon technology?

Beacons that are placed in a specific location, typically inside of a business, use Bluetooth to detect smart phones that are within a specific range. These beacons can then communicate with that device via Bluetooth. This type of technology can be a game changer if you own a small, retail business.

Retail stores are by far the best place to use beacon technology. If you own or manage a retail location, then you must engage in marketing techniques that use this type of tech. Beacons allow a business to know how many potential buyers are in their store at a given time based on the Bluetooth signal from their smart phones. The potential customers’ phone must have Bluetooth turned on a the time, so it may not be able to target every person within the store.

Since you have already spent a lot of money trying to get these customers into your retail location, you want to make sure that you make a sale. Beacons allow you the opportunity to send out targeted ads to people in your retail location on the spot.

Think about this.

You own a clothing store and use a beacon technology. You can send out a flash sale coupon to anyone in the store who has their Bluetooth turned on. This coupon could be emailed, texted, etc. and include a 10% off all purchases within the next 30 minutes.

You can also send personalized coupons or discounts that relate to a specific detail about your exact location.

There are many beacon technologies, however, Facebook may have the best. Facebook offers their Beacons to qualifying businesses.

With this beacon, which is very easy to set up, Facebook uses its Places Tips function to find cell phones within a specific location and brings local businesses’ posts to the top of that person’s news feed.

This means that you can create Places Tips specific content that you know will automatically be shown to people who are on Facebook within your location.

Let’s take a look at an example.

You are the owner of a restaurant / bar and you have a special Happy Hour menu, so you create a Places Tips piece of content that is shown only to people in the restaurant. When a couple comes in and logs into Facebook so they can check-in to let all their friends know where they are, they will see your post at the top of their feed that talks about your Happy Hour specials. That couple now orders or asks the server / bartender about these specials and a sale was made because of the Facebook Bluetooth Beacon technology.

Having the ability to show an ad to a willing and able buyer gives you a huge advantage. Making sure that you have the right type of content created is the difficult part.

Remember, no matter what industry we work in, we are ALL in the content creation industry.

If you haven’t requested your Facebook Bluetooth Beacon yet, be sure to do so now!