How to implement Proximity Marketing Campaign for your business ?

Implementing a Powerful Proximity Marketing Campaign for Your Business
What’s the big secret behind a booming retail business?
An impressive branding strategy, an army of loyal customers, or a strong online presence. The answer you’re looking forward to is a mix of all of these.
But what if you’ve achieved the above stated, and yet feel that you’re lagging behind and could do more to take your business to the next level.
Well, there’s definitely more you can do.
The changing marketing paradigm in today’s digital age has helped marketing managers create better, more effective marketing campaigns. With the number of mobile phone users growing at an astounding rate, modern retailers, whether big or small, are leaving a lot of money on the table by not tapping into this valuable resource.
Proximity marketing has emerged as one of the most captivating marketing strategies with mobile and smart devices opening up new opportunities for marketers in this domain. This particular form of marketing, sometimes referred to as hyperlocal marketing, employs cellular technology to send marketing messages to mobile-device users who are in close proximity to a business. Proximity marketing can be used by just about any business with a physical location as they can target customers within a specific perimeter.
Before diving head first into planning and implementing a power-packed proximity marketing campaign for your business, let’s take a look at the benefits of adopting proximity marketing and a few inspiring proximity campaigns used by industry leaders.
Proximity Marketing Benefits
Proximity Marketing Benefit #1 — Gain a Competitive Edge
Customers experience an interactive environment virtually everywhere they go and even the smallest of brick and mortar businesses run mobile apps. In such a fierce marketplace, proximity marketing can help you get an advantage over your competitors.
Proximity Marketing Benefit #2 — Get Immediate Conversions
A proximity marketing campaign can help drive instant traffic and also ensure a high probability of immediate conversion. With such campaigns, there’s provision to immediately connect with prospects when the likelihood that they’ll make a purchase are high. Retailers can prompt them with lucrative offers, coupons, or discount texts.
Proximity Marketing Benefit #3 — Provide Personalized Experience
Personalization is a key aspect to an awesome shopping experience. With proximity marketing, businesses can send personalized messages and at the same time, the staffs and managers in the store are alerted if a loyal customer walks in, enabling them to offer the best in-store experience to valued regulars.
Inspiring Proximity Marketing Campaigns
Proximity marketing is now mainstream and beacons technology is no more a mere retail buzzword. Leading brands have already adopted this technology to run successful marketing campaigns and leverage customer context to offer unprecedented brand experiences. Here are two proximity marketing campaigns that one can take inspiration from and put to use effectively -
Leading beauty chain Sephora successfully ran a proximity marketing campaign for its stores in 2015, while the technology was still in its infancy. As a part of their widespread loyalty platform, they prompted their esteemed customers with birthday alerts via the Sephora To Go app, asking them to pick up a special package, free with a purchase made during their birthday month. Using Beacons, they also sent out updates as well as notifications on other perks available in-store.
In the case of Woolworths, the supermarket giant sent out requests to customers to download a dedicated mobile app to avail their click-and-collect service. The app, directly connected to the in-store systems, was designed to alert the in-store staff to start completing the order when the customer reached the vicinity of the store. The app also notified the consumer of his or her order being ready. The successful trial led to the rollout of proximity marketing in over 250 Woolworths’ click-and-collect stores.
Exciting, isn’t it?
How to Plan a Proximity Marketing Campaign
To successfully implement a proximity marketing campaign, marketers need to prepare and plan each step systematically.
The first step involved in planning an influential proximity marketing campaign is defining key metrics. Getting on board the proximity marketing bandwagon requires marketers to plan and define key proximity campaign metrics. There’s no gain in running a campaign without measuring its success. Here are 4 success metrics that can be used to assess how successful the campaign was -
- App Engagement
- Store Footfall and Sales
- Customer Experience
- Customer Engagement
Secondly, businesses need to identify their target audience. To provide customers with a personalized experience through proximity marketing, it is important for businesses to understand who their target audience is, study their interests, and craft a unique message accordingly.
Finally, businesses need to develop a strong content strategy, which would help develop creative content, taking into consideration the customers’ likes and dislikes. The messages sent out to the customer should not only attract their attention but should also influence them to take an action.
Implementing a Proximity Marketing Campaign
The basic goal of running a proximity marketing campaign is to connect with customers when they are near your business and encourage them into taking some action. Prominent names in the retail industry have implemented powerful proximity marketing campaigns to promote sales and boost brand awareness and so can you by following these steps -
Picking the right location -
One key benefit of running proximity campaigns is that the messages you want to send, have a better chance of reaching a wider customer base present in the area. Places such as large retail outlets, shopping malls, and trade shows, where customers usually spend an hour or two, are major areas for running proximity marketing campaign. These are locations where people not only actively shop but also spend a longer time than usual, and hence are open to proximity marketing promotions, information, and suggestions.
Selecting the right technology -
With a plethora of technology available, choosing the right one for your campaign can be difficult. Following are the widespread methods used in proximity marketing.
Bluetooth Beacons
The most popular and widely known proximity marketing technology is Bluetooth beacon. Beacons are battery run devices equipped with Bluetooth low energy that transmit low energy to deliver contextually applicable notification on nearby smartphones.

The two beacon standards used prevalently are iBeacon and Eddystone. iBeacon is Apple’s beacon standard launched in 2013 that has been adopted by a lot of retailers like Macy’s, Walmart and Nisa in their store outlets. iBeacon consents apps on iOS devices to receive BLE signals from the beacon.
Eddystone protocol was launched by Google in the year 2015. Since the format is open and multiplatform enabled, it can be used by both iOS and Android systems. By adding more real-world context to Apple’s iBeacon concept, Google’s Eddystone limited the popularity of iBeacon in a short span of time.
Wi-Fi Based Systems
Wi-Fi is not a conventional proximity solution. However, providing free Wi-Fi facility to customers has become a common practice among businesses nowadays. Apart from boosting customer satisfaction, it also helps leverage the benefits of location-based marketing. Wi-Fi marketing is particularly beneficial since you can target your current customers based on their past activities.
Geofencing
Geofencing has become a standard practice for plenty of businesses. It is a location-based service that allows the administrating business to set up a virtual boundary around a specified location such that whenever a device enters or exits the defined boundaries, an alert is sent to the administrator. Geofencing software along with SMS marketing systems allows businesses to use a customer’s location to send out text messages when they’re near a defined boundary, such as their shop.
Mobile browsers
Mobile browsers can also be used for proximity marketing. This can be done by geotargeting a customer who has visited the company’s site and is within proximity of their offline store, irrespective of their Wi-Fi connection. This is a preferred method of location-based marketing since it does not require the audience to be connected to private Wi-Fi.
Near-field communications
Businesses can also make use of near-field communications (NFC) to boost their sales. This technology is embedded into mobile devices to enable communication between the mobile phone and a transmission device. Using NFC technology, businesses can encourage customers to repurchase by sending targeted messages to their devices.
Choosing the best way to notify customers
There are plenty of ways to push notifications to customers when they in your proximity. Irrespective of the technology you use, your notifications are the most important part of your campaign. Businesses should make sure that their notifications, whether in the form of text, media files, or links to web pages, should be concise and to the point.
Timely and contextually applicable push notifications have a great influence on customer behavior. But spamming customers with notifications and offers may result in losing valuable customers. Hence, businesses should make sure that they don’t overdo it.

Staying updated
Once businesses have their campaign out and running, it is important that stay abreast of the latest developments in technology, ongoing market trends, and competitor activities. There are times when businesses fail to realize that their campaign has grown stagnant or is out of trend resulting in the customers inclining towards products that are much more personalized to their likes and dislikes. Hence, always keep reviewing your strategy and stay updated.
Wrapping up!
The statistical trends in mobile-device usage show all the signs of a bright future for proximity marketing. This form of marketing is no more an ongoing trend but has become a valuable asset that retailers can use successfully to drive sales and enrich customer engagement. So go ahead, and plan a powerful proximity marketing campaign for your business today, to connect with your target customers, study their purchasing behavior, and develop a solid marketing solution that’ll take your business to the next level.
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Originally Published at www.henote.com
