The “all-in-one” Bluetooth marketing fallacy

Over the last few weeks, I have increasingly heard about Proximity Marketing (Bluetooth Marketing) providers offering customers one-off deals for Proximity Marketing solutions. The typical scenario is a company looking to use proximity marketing, they just want to buy the equipment and not have any further contact with the provider once they’ve bought the equipment. This sounds enticingly good, but here are a few realities about how quality Proximity Marketing systems work if you are to have a good experience:

• The handset and fingerprint database (which is used to detect the mobile phone model) need to be kept up to date. There’s something like 20 – 30 new handsets that come onto the market every month, six months down the line – with how many phones will the content work with?
• What about when phone models start appearing with new connection technologies e.g. WiFi, do you have to buy another box? Isn’t it better to be part of a system that gives you a planned upgrade path where you can build on what you have already bought rather than having to throw the box away, together with software updates to ensure your system is always at the cutting edge.
• If you want control of your Proximity Marketing system, so you can manage campaigns for yourself or on behalf of your customers, you are likely to need access to a management system. If that is the case, do you want a system that will constantly be updated with new statistics analyses, new capabilities, and kept current or do you want to stick with something that will be stuck in the past?
• To offer you a genuinely reliable system that stays working 24/7, your management system should be resiliant and have backup, redundancy and automatic server switchover infrastructure monitoring facilities in place.
• Service and support are critical.  I have been talking to a wide number of Proximity Marketing providers recently who are interested in our new Bluegiga upgrade pack. A regular concern I hear about smaller providers, is the lack of support when things go wrong. Who’s available on the end of the phone for your call? Is it only during office hours, only in one country? Or can you get hold of them any time, any place?

All these things make the difference to whether your bluetooth marketing campaign is successful or not. All these things cost us money each and every month to provide them to our customers. We don’t want these features to ever stop for our customers, and hence we charge a monthly fee for our management system, Hyperhub.

Be careful and thoughtful if you are being offered an all-in-one pay up front only package, how are these things being paid for? Are they being paid for? Or are they just missing? If they are paid for, how long is your provider budgeting on you needing it for?

Hypertag, like other quality providers, is happy to offer bulk deals with fees spread over several years paid for up front, particularly with implementations that are grant funded, because that is important and a key market requirement.

But the lesson is, if you are parting with your hard earned cash, be sure what you are getting in return? Further, make sure you have a solution that will evolve as your business does.

Jonathan Morgan