Considerations for a Successful Beacon Deployment

The Emerging Beacon Ecosystem

When Apple first quietly announced its iBeacon protocol back in September of 2013, the swell of excitement commenced. Finally, smartphone apps could be truly ‘smart’ and just as location aware indoors as they are outdoors.

Just as my GPS shows me a Google Maps view that is ‘smart’ and reflective of where I’m standing, so should be the case for a whole slew of apps serving locations such as museums, sporting venues and retail environments.

Over the last year or so there have been countless stories in the media laying out the use cases for beacons in these various environments, but what has actually been implemented only scratches the surface of the potential of the technology. What’s the hold up?

One of the primary reasons behind the gap between the technology’s potential and what we see in market can be found in confusion around the beacon stack or ecosystem itself.

From a purely hardware perspective, beacons are pretty simple, straightforward devices. But there is a significant gap between these simple pieces of hardware and a greater and scaleable end user experience. By taking a look at the beacon stack we can understand some of the complexities surrounding the technology and have a better picture of the components required to create and deliver great beacon experiences.

Without question, any large scale beacon deployment requires more than just the purchase of beacons and an app update. Getting the user experience right is not only about choosing the right hardware, but about considering the right software elements to ensure great user experiences that are easily managed and scalable.

Below I take a look at the components required to deliver on the promise of beacon tech.

Hardware

At last count there were over 1300 Apple certified iBeacon hardware manufacturers. This number is huge given how new the technology is, but not surprising given its popularity. Beacon hardware can be found in all different shapes and sizes with price points ranging from a few dollars to nearly $60 per beacon. While many manufacturers will claim otherwise, the inner workings of these devices are pretty similar. The majority of beacons incorporate either Nordic Semiconductor or Texas Instruments Bluetooth chipsets and derive power from either a battery, or a dedicated power source such as wall plug or USB port.

While the power source or battery size does impact a particular beacon’s longevity, it is really only a small piece of evaluating good beacon hardware. To separate the best from the rest it’s important to look a little deeper.

Firmware

Beyond hardware itself, a beacon’s firmware allows for the configuration of two important aspects of a beacon. How frequently the beacon transmits a signal, and how powerful that signal is. Both of these factors contribute to battery life and properly designed firmware will have implications on beacon battery life.

Most beacons allow for these two functions (power/frequency) to be adjusted. In order to ensure beacon effectiveness and reliability, both power and frequency settings should be configured appropriately given their intended use. For example, does the range of a particular beacon serve an entire store, or is it intended to serve a specific product category or aisle? Range configurability is important.

APIs

This is an important and often overlooked piece of evaluating any beacon manufacturer. In addition to their firmware, good beacon providers have a set of APIs that allow for remote management and tracking of relevant information surrounding each beacon. This includes the ability to manage your beacon ‘fleet’. Specific examples include the ability to track battery life, assign specific beacon IDs remotely and view traffic volumes for each beacon.

Mobile

Delivering beacon triggered content to any end user’s mobile device requires a mobile app that is configured to look for beacon signals. This can either be done through custom app development that includes logic to locate and properly interpret beacon signals, or by embedding a beacon SDK that comes bundled with this beacon handling logic into an existing app.

An important consideration here is to evaluate how you intend to use beacons going forward. If your use case and the content associated with it is relatively static, or consistent across long cycles, a custom build might make the most sense. If however you intend on updating the content, location, and uses for your beacon deployment, you may want to look to a 3rd party SDK and platform solution to reduce cost and time associated with frequent custom updates.

Content Management

Many beacon pilots in market today are structured as short term pilots. One of the major challenges with a more full scale beacon deployment can be found in the management of beacon content across regions and over longer periods of time. The ability to manage and update content remotely is an important consideration for larger scale deployments. Ultimately, quality solutions should allow for the easy creation, segmentation and delivery of beacon triggered content.

An additional component to look out for is the degree to which any content management solution brings in the other layers of the beacon stack. This CMS should house all relevant information to managing a beacon deployment. In addition to content creation, you’ll likely want to monitor analytics, manage your beacon configuration, and set up new campaigns from the same spot rather than having multiple accounts and logins.

Analytics

Often left out of the beacon headlines but just as important, are the data points associated with beacon engagement. In short, beacons provide a whole new source of data that can help us better understand customer interactions within the physical world, and ensure the right information is delivered at the right time.

Important to look for here are analytics solutions that make sense of the data, delivering information that matters, turning data into insights. Any analytics solution can spew out countless volumes of ‘big data’ but more important is the ‘smart’ or insight driving analytics solutions that assist in better understanding your end user and driving ROI.

User Experience

While not a technical component, it’s worth highlighting this key pillar of success when evaluating beacon deployments. While beacon triggered content must move the needle on basket size and other metrics associated with ROI, it can’t be overlooked that great customer experience is a requisite for success. Sending nothing but coupons through overly frequent push notifications is a sure fire way to turn your customers off of your mobile experience.

Conclusion

A great end-to-end beacon experience requires the best of all these component parts.

On the hardware side you need beacons that come with good firmware, APIs, and configuration tools. Any one of the thousand-plus manufacturers can make a beacon, but only a select few have built a software layer around their hardware that allows for efficient and scalable management of your beacon ‘fleet’.

Looking beyond hardware, the software layers of a beacon solution are critical. Any solution should include a mobile, content management and analytical component.

Ideally, a great beacon solution will have all these component parts bundled together, providing an end-to-end solution to manage your beacon hardware, the content associated with it, and analytical insights.

Learn more about successful beacon deployments and how the Rover platform can help here.