Proximity marketing is engaging the user at the right place and time using a variety of technologies. The video below is a visual example of the technology used to drive user engagement:
Two technologies are increasing in usage for proximity marketing: beacons and geofencing. Beacon technology offers proximity experiences using a physical device (specially useful for precision indoor location), while geofencing is fully digital and a better cost-effective measure for large outdoor locations.
A geofence is a virtual fence around a specific geographic area, and usually represents a physical location such as a store or even a country. The geofence information is used by MOCA SDK to trigger events when a user enters, leaves or dwells in the defined location. For example: when a user's smartphone comes within 100 meters of the latitude and longitude representing the center of your store (using cellular, Wi-Fi or GPS location), the device will wake up the app and deliver an ‘Enter‘ event to that geofence. This event can be associated to an array of actions, from a message to complex HTML5 creativities.
On the other hand, a beacon is a BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) device that broadcasts a signal that is detected by MOCA SDK. When the smartphone enters a beacon range, it wakes the app up and MOCA comes into play. For instance, retailers can give information and offer a discount of a product when a customer is near a specific beacon. In addition, the data collected by users passing near these Bluetooth sensors can be used to create heat maps in order to identify the most visited areas or stores, and other metrics such as frequency, dwell time, number of visits to the store and so much more.
Proximity data provides crucial insights on users’ interactions with mobile devices and the context of it, allowing everything from retailers, hotels, event organizers and more, to better understand customers’ behaviour, which increases the chance of anticipating their needs, encouraging more loyalty, improving customer experience and increasing mobile conversion.
Importantly, all of these factors combine to make Proximity Marketing a very effective tool for generating higher ROI for businesses and advertisers and increasing user satisfaction and experiences.