Marketing: you won’t believe what Wi-Fi can do for you! At a time when 4G is almost everywhere, is Wi-Fi still useful? Yes !
Far from just providing Internet access, Wi-Fi can be a crucial communication channel, enabling businesses to launch a data-centric marketing strategy that is bound to be more engaging and ROI-enhancing.
Wi-Fi is a communication channel like any other
Today, Wi-Fi is synonymous with Internet access, but most of the 13 million active hotspots in France offer an intermediary page between the connection request and validation. This captive portal, which authenticates the user, is a powerful marketing tool that can transform Wi-Fi into a communication channel… provided it is used intelligently.
The captive portal makes it possible to push relevant content based on the audience. Depending on the user’s location, gender and history, it acts as an aggregator of qualified content, specially chosen to engage them.
The cornerstone of a data-driven marketing strategy
Once the user is authenticated, the captive portal becomes a medium: an engaging landing page, dedicated to exclusive content and offering direct benefits to its readers. The aim behind this channel is to build a community in order to boost brand awareness and, ultimately, conversion.
For example, a shopping centre can direct its connected users to particular geographical areas via promotions. A brand can offer a gamification system to make waiting easier, and a restaurant can set up a queue-breaker.
Analysing the history of these behaviours is the cornerstone of a data-driven marketing strategy: using the data to better re-address users on other channels with relevant and original content.
Wi-Fi to enhance the user experience
User experience is now an essential part of the customer relationship, and a key factor in attracting and retaining customers, which can only be achieved through a data-driven strategy.
Wi-Fi marketing is particularly relevant for venues such as stadiums, especially in the run-up to 2024, when the Olympic Games will be an opportunity for Paris to shine around the world… but also to win the loyalty of the tourists who will be staying there. This will involve digitising these venues to boost user immersion via participatory games, via an application that ‘enhances’ the event or quite simply by offering services directly from the stands.
At the crossroads of digital and marketing, Wi-Fi can become an essential channel in a communications strategy. But while the captive portal and content play a key role in this architecture, data remains the central tool in this new economy.
