It’s hard for a local business to learn about their customers the way digital companies usually do. Brick-and-mortar shops, like the local dry cleaner and a mom-and-pop bagel place, tend to get to know their customers face-to-face rather than by collecting personal data. 

For digital businesses, communicating with their customers and promoting their products doesn’t stop with a purchase. These companies work on building a big online presence and collect personal data from customers and prospects in a variety of ways, from internet cookies to email addresses, and so on. 

Even an army of good sales reps at local shops can’t keep up with the targeted adverts and promotions that digital businesses pull off using their customers’ social data and contact information. That is unless those local businesses have the customer data to create smarter targeted marketing campaigns made possible by WiFi marketing.

The Digital Advantage

Online businesses have the advantage of increasing their brand recognition and customer loyalty through digital marketing campaigns. These campaigns are usually based on the insights provided by various digital analytics tools. 

These insights come from a multichannel presence that collects data about customers and the trends in their shopping behavior. Local businesses can approach the process of synthesizing customer data from multiple channels the same way digital companies do by using WiFi marketing strategies.

Online businesses can analyze their customers’ shopping trends at any time by pulling customer engagement metrics from the different platforms available to them, including mobile apps, websites, and social media profiles. Each of these platforms gets personal data points from a prospective customer, like a phone number or email address. 

Luckily, now brick-and-mortars too can leverage this breadth of data to make their customer outreach more effective. Implementing a WiFi marketing solution is the first step for local businesses to engage customers using previously unavailable methods.

As you can imagine, the ever-growing number of touchpoints enables online businesses to market more effectively to their customers. Local businesses can achieve the same with WiFi marketing by using touchpoints over email, SMS, and social media.

A WiFi marketing platform enables brick-and-mortar businesses to gather this information through their free WiFi network and start to communicate with their customers after the visit. These businesses can focus on their physical presence while growing customer engagement with smarter data-enabled marketing campaigns.

A customer that visits your local client’s location will happily share their information in exchange for the free WiFi. From there, marketers can use those touchpoints to generate campaigns that previously used to be accessible for digital businesses alone. 

WiFi Marketing Drives the Conversation

A customer who logs into a brick-and-mortar’s free WiFi network is never forgotten after they left the location if the business is taking advantage of WiFi marketing. That customer may even visit at a certain time of day more than once. Whatever the case, that’s enough data to start personalizing the brand-to-customer engagement with them.

For example, your local business client can pleasantly surprise their customers the next time they visit with automated messaging personalized to them based on the collected data. Or maybe they haven’t visited in a while, timely automated communication with a special offer might be a great way to get them to return.

Let a customer know that a special promo is running for their birthday, for instance. This can be done with the social media data they shared when they used the free WiFi.

Local Business but Make It Multichannel

WiFi marketing enables local businesses to provide the multichannel experience organically, as long as customers know to log in to use the free WiFi. So don’t forget to let them know it’s available! 

It’s worth taking a page from the digital marketing strategies like PPC, email marketing, and digital advertising, where the ROI can be very positive because of clear, data-enabled understanding of customers. These can be particularly useful to local businesses who need a foundation on which to build targeted advertisement or loyalty engagement campaigns that WiFi marketing makes possible. 

WiFi marketing gives local businesses the insights they need to keep creating and tailoring communications with customers, be it on social media, over email, or through a text message. Local businesses running a campaign for a new service or product can drive its success further by engaging their customers according to their preferences. Let WiFi marketing keep your client’s customers enjoying more of what they love about the business.