The busiest selling time of the year is upon us! While the holiday shopping season is under way for consumers, retail marketers received their presents early in the way of beacons and location based marketing to improve their holiday sales. But like the holiday season itself, rife with myths and lore, so is the understanding of beacons and location-based marketing. We’ve scoured the world for the top myths and misconceptions about beacons to parse out fact from fiction and have put them together in handy list debunked. Enjoy!

MYTH #1
Having beacon hardware is all you need to do location-based marketing.
It is definitely a step in the right direction. However, the beacon hardware needs to be integrated with your app through SDKs and you will need a platform to manage messaging and analytics. Beacons are ideal for enhancing a user’s micro-location experience. Did you know that geofencing is available to provide you with your user’s macro-location? In fact, the combo of these two technologies blended with our platform solution results in less false-positives and helps ensure you interact with users when and where it matters the most.

MYTH #2
Adopting this technology means a lot more work for developers.
We apologize in advance that this answer is somewhat self-serving in order to be accurate. If your developers are integrating the technology into your app AND building the platform to manage, analyze and manage the messaging, then yes, it is a ton of work. However, Gimbal is the only comprehensive solution that provides enterprise grade hardware, and a turnkey platform.

MYTH #3
Using location-based technology to market in real time is intrusive to our customers.
Remember, your users are opting in to your app which means they care about what you have to say. As with any marketing messaging, it need to be targeted, and relevant. When you send an email to a segmented audience it is probably both of those things. However, the missing piece is that you don’t know where your user is located when they receive the email. Are they out of the country? In a meeting? In the hospital? One could argue that the timing of your email is “intrusive.” Unquestionably, sending a targeted relevant message to your user while they are in your store or venue enhances their experience and adds value to your brand.

MYTH #4
Marketers will have to adapt to an entirely new way of marketing using location-based technology.
Actually, this technology is just an addition to your Omni-channel, and uses the same funnel you have already established. The advantage is that you can serve up relevant messaging to the user when they are in the proximity to physically take action. Side note: You can even do physical A/B testing.

MYTH #5
It’s impossible to determine attribution/ ROI for physical (real world) Omni-channel strategy.
Wrong! Gimbal technology can provide the most accurate first party location data for real world attribution and is truly a game changer. As the digital experience that your customers have with your brand moves increasingly away from a PC toward smart, connected devices, the need to know a user’s context increases. This is a new ballgame for leading brands that want to deliver rich experiences to their customers and followers in environments as varied as retail, social, entertainment and sports venues.