The use of beacon-enabled marketing is expected to increase dramatically in 2015 as it continues to move to the forefront of major retailers’ strategies, including McDonald’s, Neiman Marcus and Macy’s in the US. However, it is more than just the physical retailers who will be able to benefit from this technology.
Onyx Beacon – maker of beacons and provider of CMS platform to manage the technology and data – is launching a new ProximityAds feature, which will extend the capabilities to of retailers’ beacon infrastructure to suppliers and marketing partners, including micro-location based ads and offers.
For suppliers, this means access and visibility to a much larger group of potential customers, and information about their shopping habits. For the retailers who own the beacon infrastructure, this means additional advertising content from suppliers, while still remaining in control of what ads and notifications are being sent to users.
“A typical use case we see for large deployments of our Beacons in retail spaces is: the manager of the retail location wants to make available its Onyx Beacon infrastructure to suppliers and marketing partners just like he makes available shelve space and other areas in retail locations for promotion and advertising. Retailers want to expand their promotional and advertising relationships with suppliers into the mobile world. This makes it possible to also reach consumers on mobile devices not only through displays, promotional staff or print media,” explains Bogdan Oros, CoFounder and CEO of Onyx Beacon. “Extending a brands’ reach on consumers’ devices and delivering a notification in the right place and at the right time is of great value and has a large impact. It also allows retailers to leverage their iBeacon infrastructure to generate additional value and revenue.”
Giving large consumer goods companies and other third parties access to existing users, their micro-location and detailed indoor locations represents an important step towards making iBeacon technology available to a wider audience. In this context, iBeaconTM infrastructure owners maintain control over what Ads and notifications are being sent to App users.
Retailers or other owners of iBeacon infrastructure are able to invite and approve potential advertisers giving them control over what communication is reaching users and at what budget or cost per notification. Thus they ensure a level of quality and frequency of notifications that reach consumers.
“Advertising has its largest impact when it reaches a consumer in the right context. Our partners are able from the beginning to tag their beacons, meaning to add real-world context to a beacon’s surroundings. We know if a beacon is in the candy isle or in the frozen food section in a retail store. It is even more precise in many cases, meaning close to white chocolate or black chocolate in the candy isle, frozen seafood or frozen vegetables or ice cream in the frozen food section,” says Oros.
