Making your Proximity Marketing Campaign Work for You
What makes one proximity marketing campaign “good” while others are just “mediocre” or even “bad”?
Take the above campaign for instance. While I may be able to use this campaign in my home, and I may even be able to reach all of the stakeholders (a total of 4 phones), will the campaign really succeed? I hope so, but shouldn’t bank on it…
In order for a campaign to be successful, several factors need to all align:
- The “customers” need to be ready to receive the information
- The “customers” need to want the information
- The “customers” need to know what to do with the information
In my campaign above, none of these criteria will necessarily be met. Why is that?
First of-all, my “customers” (a.k.a. family members) each have phones that may or may not support the ability to receive the content. If, say, a customer has an iPhone 3G, then their phone simply cannot receive OPP or FTP data from another device. In my household, that immediately takes one phone out of the picture.
Now, let’s say the other “customer” only supports receiving data when paired. This implies that the phone won’t receive the information either without throwing a nasty message to the user. Users respond in varying ways, but if they aren’t expecting it, they will likely reject the message.
Two “customers” down.
The third family member is too young to find the content relevant. While she may accept the message, she would laugh it off (in fact, she’d probably run to me and tell me that she got a silly message on her phone). Yet another lost “customer”.
That leaves only me.
By definition, the message doesn’t help me which means that my campaign is completely ineffective.
Now let’s consider three steps I could have taken to make this campaign more effective…
- Announce the campaign ahead of time.
- Create real value in my campaign for the recipients.
- Create a compelling message with a clear call to action.
Now let’s apply these concepts…
1) Announce the campaign ahead of time.
I actually did the right thing when I established the campaign at my home. I ran around to all members of the household and said:
“Please turn on your phones and make them discoverable. I’m testing-out some Bluetooth proximity marketing solutions.”
The result was very good. Everybody had their phone’s Bluetooth wireless interface enabled AND was staring at the phone, awaiting something special!
What a great success rate. 100%. Now, you shouldn’t expect the same level of success in other environments, but the more people know about the existance of Bluetooth proximity marketing in your area ahead of time, the better your chance of success.
2) Create real value in my campaign for the recipients.
Here’s where my campaign failed badly. There was absolutely nothing in the campaign for the “customer”. In fact, the campaign that I mounted was all about ME, which is the absolute worst thing you can possibly do with your marketing campaigns in general.
If you want your campaign to succeed, you need to make it about the customer, not about you, your business, or your products/services.
A better choice would have been to create a campaign with a statement like this:
Bring this picture to me and I’ll take you out for ice cream!
I guarantee that the results would have been infinitely more effective!
3) Create a compelling message with a clear call to action.
In this campaign, the message was pretty clear as was the call to action, despite being entirely misguided with respect to my customer’s interests. Keep your messages short & sweet. The fewer words you can use to get the point across, the better.
Whatever you do - always keep your customer in mind. Your campaigns will benefit from it, as will your audience.