Monday, October 06, 2014

Beacons as the future of location-based advertising


Location-based advertising is an increasingly popular format in digital advertising that allows marketers to optimize their customer targeting, presenting more relevant ads to the users. This allows companies to boost the ROI on their marketing campaigns. However, often GPS and WiFi services fail to offer the granularity needed to determine the exact location of the customer and offer precise content, restraining the quality of their output to an area or neighbor location that limits the possibilities of the ads.

Beacons emerge as small hardware devices that communicate with mobile phones and other devices with wireless capabilities (e.g. Bluetooth) located in their proximity to provide an exact location of the customer. They also feature specific capabilities like the possibility to send  personalized messages. Although beacons still present certain limitations that are being solved (e.g. energy issues, or use of Bluetooth by customers), they are expected to revolutionize mobile advertising by improving the relevance of the content and therefore the response rate and leads originated in the customer. As a sign of their potential, Apple is heavily investing in them, as they launched its own proprietary system last year called iBeacon.
In this interesting article we can read a complete description on how beacon advertising works and how to make a better use of it. A better way to use beacons

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