Shedding Light On How Companies View BLE Beacons

Location-based services have been around for years, but recently the market heated up with the introduction of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons. BLE beacons are small sensors that  you can attach to any location or object. They broadcast radio signals which your smartphone can receive and interpret. Companies want to use beacons to provide personalized and contextual experiences to their customers, prospects and employees. BLE promises to enable micro-location targeting with hyper-local content.

There are numerous startups in the space such as Estimote, Gimbal and Radius. Apple ’s introduction of iBeacon, a technology built into the mobile operating system that allows iPhones to serve as BLE transmitters and receivers, has piqued the interest of many industries where indoor location might be important.

WLAN networking companies, such as Aruba Networks and Cisco Systems, are also augmenting existing indoor triangulation technologies with BLE offerings. While the technical approaches of each company differs, both companies offer strategies for combining multiple indoor location technologies and analytics to understand the movement of people and assets. In addition to delivering personalized experiences, Cisco stressed the importance of using indoor location to drive real time business impact through areas such as movement and dwell time, staffing and asset management and supporting emergency operations with more precise location information.

Of course, this isn’t without its challenges. Any of these solutions require a person to turn on Bluetooth, accept location services on the relevant app and opt-in to receive notifications. The enthusiasm for beacons is great, but will they drive business value and how? The answer of course varies.

John Bollen, the Chief Digital Officer of MGM Resorts , is currently using WLANs to deliver services, such as indoor mapping. While he’s considered beacons, his existing indoor location services are already driving customer value. He questions how beacons will impact the customer experience. When I interviewed Bollen, we discussed whether customers were interested in MGM to sending them an ad or a notification everywhere they went and each time they pass the same location. Bollen didn't think this was the best way to create engagement and he's right. This isn’t to say MGM won’t use beacons in the future. But before deploying any new technology, Bollen wants to find use cases that make sense. He also wants to create content that enables a consistent message and experience across all of the digital touchpoints in the resorts, including mobile apps, kiosks, IPTV and the Web.

Like Bollen, Nicole Jeter West, Senior Director of Ticketing and Digital Strategy 
for the US Tennis Association (USTA), stressed the importance of using beacons to make messages relevant. At the MEnterprise Conference in Boston, she noted the technical challenges of understanding how to place beacons, but also the business challenges of how to use beacons. She believes companies need to focus on intelligent messaging. For example, the first time you enter one of the tennis venues, the beacon at the gate spots you and it welcomes you. But the second time, the app and messaging system are smart enough to know if you’ve already been to the venue and the messages change to offer you valuable information for the day and the event that you’re attending. Jeter West also spoke of the need for analytics and measurable goals that can prove the value of beacons through new insights, such as understanding venue traffic flow and tracking sponsor engagement.

One airline I met with described several interesting ideas on how to use beacons. A beacon could be used to alert the airline if a traveler is in the airport security line or help a parent find a lost child. I’m sure this will improve air travel for passengers. Beacons can also improve messaging with features such as guided directions to the club lounge.

What can we learn from these stories? In many ways, the mobile advertising hasn't changed in years. Using beacons to annoy your customers with irrelevant information is harmful. Leading marketers understand that beacons can provide the right information at the right time. If done correctly, beacons can provide the opportunity to do something different that couldn't be done before. And like all things, a company should have a sense of what it's trying to measure and what analytical tools it needs to track its progress.