A summer’s walk through Lathkill Dale…

A few weekends ago I was in the Peak District enjoying the summer weather. We decided to walk through Lathkill Dale from Over Haddon to Monyash as the weather was hot, and we heard the orchids were out.

Hypertag provides Natural England via the Peak Experience organisation with Proximity technology (otherwise known as ‘Bluetooth Marketing’) for Lathkill Dale. This is a pilot which we hope will be extended, and ultimately rolled out amongst other rural locations under Natural England’s remit.

The premise is how do you put information in the hands of the walkers to help them get more out of their walk? The use of mobile phones is the perfect solution as you can compress a huge amount of information into a mobile Java Application, and structure that information so that the walker can access what they need quickly and easily. This offers much wider possibilities than would be available with just the static signs or via leaflets that could be distributed.

At Lathkill Dale, Hypertags powered either by ultra long life batteries or a solar panel (in the case of a single Hypertag) allow the walker to download the information to their phone as they walk past five points of interest.

Each point is clearly marked with a Nature Bytes sign, and gives out a different piece of content, from the core Peak Experience application to the sounds of birds the walker will hear as they walk through the Dale, to photos of butterflies they are likely to encounter.

Be sure to look out for the Nature Bytes signs this summer if you are out and about in the Peak District.

Why you should use a quality Bluetooth marketing provider? (Part 2)

Following on from Part 1 of this post, I would now like to look at some more issues that separate quality Bluetooth marketing providers from budget ones.

More content types can be downloaded

Budget providers often offer the ability to send out only one type of content or a very limited set of content. Hypertag and other quality providers allow customers to run campaigns from the simple through to the very complex. Indeed, bespoke campaigns that have never been run before can be created from scratch to meet the exacting requirements of individual brands. That can’t be done with a budget system that only has a simple interface supplied on a CD. Delivering complex campaigns needs an advanced content server that underpins the system and the technical knowledge and understanding to know how best to deploy it.

Spending less

If you want to run a campaign with more than one Bluetooth content server (We call these ‘Hypertags’), it will often be cheaper to useh a quality supplier like Hypertag. Hypertag’s expertise lies in its internally-developed software. This software can be updated and campaigns managed remotely, which means as new features are added, you benefit straight away. As technology develops, you don’t have to buy another Bluetooth content server because the server can be upgraded with new features automatically. In essence you are future-proofing your investment.

Benchmarking

Hypertag has stored all the statistics from all of its campaigns it has run over the last seven years from around the world. This means it can advise you how to deploy the campaign for best success because it knows what works – and of course what doesn’t. A budget Bluetooth marketing provider will not have central usage monitoring and therefore each ‘campaign’ has to be deployed in isolation of every other one with no cross-over learning possible. What’s the point in saving a few pounds on the equipment if it’s going to be a wasted? Isn’t it better to use equipment where at least you will know whether your campaign was successful, and how you could improve it for next time?

Experience and advice

Plugging in a budget Bluetooth content server and hoping for the best is no way to achieve great results. If all you want to do is prove you can send content over Bluetooth, use a laptop. If you want to use a Bluetooth server to achieve a really effective campaign, you need to work with a quality provider. Frankly, the technology is the straightforward bit. The clever bit is in knowing how to use it to achieve the results you need.

Increase retail sales by 40%; Hypertag knows how to do it. Increase conversion through online sales by 40%; Hypertag knows how to do it. Want to pick up subscribers to your online news service; Hypertag knows how to do it. Want to build a database, activate your sponsorship, create some buzz; Hypertag knows how to use the technology and is able to advise you how to deploy the technology in your environment to have great results. It knows this because unlike many providers, it has direct involvement in every campaign meaning it learns what and doesn’t work from every campaign that runs on its servers. This leads to a dramatically shorter learning curve for you and less money spent to achieve the best results.

Service

The final reason you should consider a quality provider like Hypertag, is service. It’s all well and good buying your Budget Bluetooth box off the Internet, but what happens when it doesn’t quite work like you hoped? Who do you phone? Where do you go for help? Hypertag thinks that it’s important to have someone you could talk to – an expert who knows what they are doing. With Hypertag you have that 24/7 if you need it. No matter where in the world you are, what you are trying to do, if you can get to your phone, we are here to help.

Bluetooth marketing is new and it’s not as easy to achieve a successful campaign as you might think. If you want to make the best of your campaign, you are going to have questions, and you want someone to be available with answers that are relevant to you.

So what’s the bottom line?

If you have £75 ($100) and you want to prove content can be sent to a phone over Bluetooth, place that £75 back in your pocket, find a computer with Bluetooth and go for it.

If you want to really achieve success with a Bluetooth marketing campaign, pick up the phone, or reach for your computer, and get in touch with me (Jonathan), Elaine, Liz, Graham or anyone else at Hypertag and we can start to help you achieve great results from one of the most powerful and accountable marketing methods available today.

Of course you could also approach one of our quality competitors, but of course we hope that you don’t!

Jonathan Morgan

Why you should use a quality Bluetooth marketing provider? (Part 1)

I would like to take head on a question I am asked or overhear being asked nearly every week:

“I want to do Bluetooth  Marketing but why do I need someone like Hypertag when there are budget Bluetooth Marketing providers out there offering systems for as little as £75 ($100) ?”

I would advise you to always use a quality provider and I have summarised what I see as some of the key reasons:

Strong technical benefits

There are many technical reasons why quality Bluetooth marketing solutions who make significant investments in software development, provide better performance; here are just a couple of examples.

a. reliable simultaneous content download to several phones

If you have Bluetooth on your computer, it’s not that difficult to work out how to send an image from the computer to a Bluetooth enabled mobile phone. Frankly that’s the easy bit. If all you want to be able to do was that, then you would never need a Bluetooth Marketing provider in the first place. Budget providers only offer systems that work on the same basis.

Budget Bluetooth systems typically use only one Bluetooth transmitter. This works acceptably in a situation where you only have a low number of phones near a single Bluetooth system, but breaks down the minute you have many Bluetooth enabled phones in the vicinity. In most Bluetooth Marketing situations, it will be the case that many Bluetooth phones will be in the area and it is likely that many consumers will want to download content at the same time.

Hypertag uses multiple Bluetooth transceivers and antennae and uses sophisticated company-developed software that works out the optimum use of the transceiver to offer consumers the best experience without waiting for an existing download to complete. A simple computer equipped with a Bluetooth dongle can’t offer anything like the same experience.

b. reliable back-end networking

Budget providers often offer network-connected Bluetooth content servers that use a simple USB modem to manage the Bluetooth marketing system. If you have ever used this type of phone with a laptop, you are sure to be aware that an occasional crash occurs. The same will happen with a budget Bluetooth content server. Hypertag uses special modems and GPRS data network suppliers that are designed for 24/7 operation as having poor backhaul will often require the expense of a physical service visit – which will almost certainly blow your campaign budget!

1.    Priority on download

This capability creates clear blue water between Hypertag and other quality providers – not just budget providers. Most Bluetooth content servers prioritise ‘pick up’, which means people receive the messages offering them the content download on their phone quickly but then they have to wait longer for the download. This is because the phone is so busy sending those initial messages to every phone in the vicinity that they do not have the time to do the download!

Hypertag uniquely prioritises download. We send the pick up message and then immediately ensure that the mobile phone has received the requested content before we move onto pick up another phone. This means people who receive the download message receive their content as quickly as possible. Through years of experience, we have found that this gives the best experience for consumers and leads to higher download levels.

Unfortunately, campaigns using budget Bluetooth marketing providers, will see lots of people being alerted in their campaigns, but few people will be able to download the content in a reasonable timeframe. They will just run out of patience and walk away very unhappy. This is not a good use of campaign budgets.

More phones will be compatible with the Bluetooth content server.

To work well, a Bluetooth content server needs a database of all mobile phones in current use. This is because every model of mobile phone has different capabilities in terms of what content can be shown and the aspect ratios and sizes of their screens. Before any content can be downloaded, the phone’s display capabilities needs to be identified.

Our phone database, which has over 1,500 different phones, is growing all the time. It’s kept up to date with new phones as they come onto the market. For budget providers, the costs of keeping such a database up to date are just too great. Furthermore, if you haven’t been keeping the phone database up to date over a period of time, it’s very hard to go back and provide support for phones that aren’t sold anymore.

One challenge is that Bluetooth content servers can’t recognise the exact model from the phone’s Bluetooth signature. All quality providers have to use a way of determining  what model is requesting the download from information that is available. Hypertag calls this the phone’s ‘fingerprint’. To do this well, you have to have a very large fingerprint database and some clever software to work out which fingerprint is which phone and put its information together with that you have in your phone database.

To make this task really challenging, two completely different phones can fingerprint the same way. To uniquely identify a phone reliably, so that the vast majority of users receive the right content for their phone, you need some serious technical investment. It’s very unlikely that a budget provider will have any capability approaching this in their system.

Only experienced Bluetooth marketing providers have the means and the ability to implement these types of systems and keep them up to date.

In part 2, we will look at some more reasons why it is best to work with quality Bluetooth marketing providers.

Jonathan Morgan.