It’s no mystery to anyone on the planet that the smartphone has changed the way we interact with our world. It has the power to distract, but, moreover, the power to help. Consumers want more options, more interaction and more “smart” in their smartphone. This is where the physical web, beacons and other location-specific devices have a unique position to make our devices and the websites and apps upon them more connected to the businesses and those highly-valuable marketing efforts you’ve been running.

There are a few proximity marketing devices being used out there: beacons, geo-location, wifi and NFC to name a few. Beacons more recently being of the most popular types. They are passive Bluetooth™ tech that allow the consumer to interact with the world around them in unique and personalized ways. Long gone are the days when everyone gets the same exact overwhelming and useless message. You can send or push videos, personalized landing pages, content and offers that are relevant to your consumer at an exact moment in time.

Four Reasons to Start Using Proximity Marketing Today

1. Smart Campaigns
   The insights from how your consumers interact with your marketing campaign are invaluable. Push notifications and targeted campaigns can be easily measured. How is it being used? How many people interacted with it? Is it valuable to the consumer? With the insights into your consumer’s behavior, you can make smarter decisions moving forward, which makes them happy and you happy.
2. Push Notifications
   So, here comes the fun part. With proximity-based marketing, we have the capability of turning the world around the consumer into a Notification Center. They’re walking by your store, your restaurant, your event – interacting with your brand at that moment. It’s an amazing time to reach them with a highly personalized coupon, message, game or offer.
3. Better Consumer Experience
   Your consumers are going to thank you. They’re asking for more personalization; they don’t want what everyone else is getting. They also don’t want to be sold to, but they do want to buy from you. If you’re sending them the wrong message at the wrong time, they may ignore your brand – or worse yet, drop you altogether. When they receive something, whether by email, social or push notification, that is immediately relevant to their needs (or wants), they are going to engage with you.
4. Higher Awareness and Conversion
   For marketers today, conversion (the one metric to rule them all) is the holy grail. Personalized proximity campaigns see a 44-percent lift in engagement almost immediately, according to Google. So even if your one metric isn’t conversion, the fact that you’re paying attention enough to that consumer will make them feel surprised and delighted, which will lead to brand lift and awareness, as well.

Time to get a move on …
Overall, personalizing campaigns with proximity equals more work. It’s not a perfect, one-fell-swoop, click-and-boom-delivered tactic. There is some careful thought and consideration and market segmentation you have to do. But don’t let that sound as though it’s a lot of work. It’s not. Start small and experiment some with one to two market segments. Offer a BOGO to one and a 15% OFF to the other. You’re putting in the effort up-front, but the end result is a more fitting marketing campaign, better reach and awareness, and the personalized touch to that consumer will leave them feeling in love with what you have to offer.

70% of smartphone owners who bought something in a store first turned to their devices for information relevant to that purchase. And when people search on mobile, it tends to lead to action: 92% of those who searched on their phone made a related purchase.”
– Lisa Gevelber, VP of Marketing at Google