What is WiFi Marketing and How Can it Help Your Small Business?

WiFi marketing is being touted as the latest must-have for your small business toolbox. There’s good evidence to support this when you consider recent reports stating WiFi is airborne in more ways than one with 82 airlines now offering it inflight. WiFi is everywhere and it’s a staple for even brick and mortar stores and the way they do business.

Small Business Trends got in touch with Mike Waite, Vice President of Marketing at Zenreach to learn more about how this marketing platform can benefit small businesses with physical locations.

“WiFi marketing turns guest WiFi hotspots into a marketing platform that automatically tracks items like customer visits, while building rich client profiles, automating and targeting communication more precisely, while directly measuring in-store impact,” he wrote in an email.

WiFi Marketing Streamlines The Process

Essentially, it streamlines the process of collecting customer contact information and profile characteristics. Small business owners who don’t have a lot of time or a big budget to hire people to do this kind of analytics will find WiFi marketing useful. You can even track visitor behavior so you can clearly define your target market and send personalized offers.

Waite explains how it works using his company’s product as an example since they pioneered the process.  The brands currently on their roster include familiar names like Anheuser-Busch.

Provide a Customer Access Point

“When a customer comes into a store outfitted with a Zenreach access point, basically a router, they can use a customized portal to connect to the WiFi,” he writes. “ They exchange an email address for access. This allows the business to send them special offers, as well as determine how frequently they come into the business.”

Speed is one of the essential marketing aspects for any small business. Zenreach  claims that small businesses can collect customer visit behavior, demographic info and other key information five times faster using their technique than with more traditional methods. It’s a digital way to do away with the costs of comment cards and other older technologies that need to be sifted through.

Tailor Marketing to Customer Profiles

One of the big advantages here is an automated system. For example, it can accelerate what would otherwise be slow processes like collecting and evaluating emails from a website. It allows small businesses to shift the focus away from data collection to a focus on marketing based on customer profiles.

There’s just one caveat — small businesses do better with WiFi marketing when they have a physical location.

“We’ve seen impressive success across a broad range of business types, including restaurants, coffee shops, bars, retailers, bowling alleys, hotels, spas, casinos, family entertainment centers and even museums,” Waite writes.  “ Any business that has a physical location can benefit from WiFi marketing.”

He also says WiFi marketing acts like a bridge linking online communications and advertising with brick and mortar results.

Monitor Results

“WiFi marketing will allow them to monitor the results of not just their email outreach, but digital communication of all kinds, in order to understand real results and ROI,” Waite explains.

It can also help you head off potential issues too.  Pieology Pizza reports how they use the Zenreach tool for content collection, email marketing and reputation management.

“Zenreach gives me a chance to make sure our customers are happy,”  says Vice President of Operations James Hilovsky in a company release.  “I can follow up if they have a negative experience and share offers with them. It’s easy. Everybody likes to be listened to. I think it gives them a sense of loyalty when a brand talks to them.”

So far Zenreach has added 13,000 contacts in the first 10 months of using WiFi marketing.

Image: Depositphotos.com

This article, "What is WiFi Marketing and How Can it Help Your Small Business?" was first published on Small Business Trends