What is the problem?
Lately, marketing is more and more evolving into the digital age. With incredible platforms built to cater for every technology touchpoint that we can get our hands on, professionals have built vast systems that encompass a variety of consumer habits and circumstances. However, one key aspect of marketing remains completely caught in old ways, untouched by the vast power that the technological age has brought upon us, and that is providing customized marketing to people in-person. In a typical in-person scenario, both parties must invest a variety of resources in order to reach a mutually beneficial agreement, and even then, success isn’t guaranteed [1].
Currently, businesses must go through an arduous process in order to launch a contextualized campaign. For a typical scenario a human attendant would have to walk to a customer, have a long chat about their interests, recommend a product based on knowledge alone, then would hope that the customer buys a product & signs up to a loyalty program and only then can you send promotional material and contextualized marketing. As you can imagine, this process is too slow.
How can this be improved?
We have developed a new piece of software that will bridge the physical and the digital world and provide fast contextualized marketing results. This technology relies on the use of iBeacons. iBeacons are small Bluetooth devices that smartphones can detect. We can utilize this technology to determine when customers have entered and left business locations and how much time users have spent in specific business locations.
How does it work?
In order for this integration to work, we utilize the power of iBeacons alongside SAP Marketing Cloud and SAP Sales Cloud. For demonstrating how the products work we will use a business scenario called Fire & Ice. Fire & Ice is a business to business kitchen supply company with two main lines of products – fridges and grills. First, Fire & Ice will release an iOS or Android app. This app can be in any form the company would like but in this specific case we made an app for displaying upcoming products in their next trade show.
Fire & Ice App
Fire & Ice will then start advertising the app. They put an advertisement up on their SAP Commerce Cloud webstore with a QR Code to install the app. Next, on the day of the trade show many customers will come and visit the booth. At the booth, the company showcases fridges and grills. Once a customer that has the app installed stands next to one of the fridges for a very long time, their smartphone detects the iBeacon and sends that interaction to SAP Marketing Cloud. After this, the customer may go look at some grills, but don’t stay around there for long and end up heading to another booth. That’s another possible conversion, completely unnoticed by show staff. However, in Fire & Ice’s SAP Marketing Cloud, this interaction wasn’t left unnoticed.
As you can see, SAP Marketing Cloud keeps data on when the user has interacted with the iBeacons around the booth, and at what times, as well as how interested the customer is in the product, which can be analysed by the product interest word mosaic. The bigger the word on the mosaic, the higher interest the customer has. After this interaction, we can now start to send some contextualized marketing. In order to do this, we will send a notification to the client’s phone, this can be done a few days after the trade show or can be done instantly on the floor. The user will then receive a notification on their phone. When the user taps on the notification they will be taken to the SAP Commerce Cloud Store. Now, depending on what the user has the highest interest in on SAP Hybris Marketing, their store experience will be different. The screenshots below demonstrate the main banner for the SAP Commerce Cloud Storefront in two different scenarios. The first screenshot shows the main home screen banner, but the second depicts the banner with advertising relating to user interests. Furthermore, the products that are displayed on the SAP Commerce Cloud store will be only refrigerators, reflecting the customers interest in Fridges, and not so high in grills.
1 Regular Front Banner
2 Front Banner With Fridge Advertising
After all of the recommendations the customer then chooses to call up Fire & Ice to purchase a new fridge, and just like that, a simple customer walking into a trade show stall, turned into a conversion that none of the company staff even have to directly influence.
What’s in it for me?
As you can see, marketing like this is extremely powerful. Without even interacting with any humans, businesses could easily see high conversion rates through bridging the digital and physical world. In order to experience this scenario in action or ask questions about any other possible scenarios contact our experts at Camelot ITLab.
[1] Shu-Hui Chuang. (2019). Facilitating the chain of market orientation to value co-creation: The mediating role of e-marketing adoption. Journal of Destination Marketing & Management, 7, 39 – 49.
We would like to thank Jacob Pyke for his valuable contribution to this article.
