Beacons technology has become one of the most popular ways to connect customers across sectors, particularly in retail and marketing, due to its low cost, ease of deployment, and obvious effectiveness. If you’re unfamiliar with the technology and want to use it in your business, this guide will teach you all you need to know about beacons.
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What is Beacons Technology?
In a beacons are specialized computer systems designed to do extremely particular tasks. In general, they are proximity transmitters, which are generally the size of a conventional modem. They employ Bluetooth wireless technology to link different devices, either within the beacon network or external IoT devices. Beacons employ proximity technology to detect human presence and execute pre-programmed actions to provide Beacons Technology with informative, contextual, and personalized experiences.
Brief History: Where Did Bacon’s Technology Begin?
Beacons technology has a long history, and it is strongly tied to the Internet of Things (loT), beginning with Bluetooth and accelerating with the evolution of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), currently known as Bluetooth Smart.
The Bluetooth protocol (developed in 1994 by telecommunications service provider Ericsson) has been around for a long time, allowing the wireless transfer of data including audio and video by establishing a wireless personal network with shared data.
According to a recent new research report, the worldwide smart beacon market produced more than $3 billion in 2020 and is predicted to reach $103.94 billion by 2030, rising at a CAGR of 37.70% between 2021 and 2030.BLE was introduced as part of Bluetooth 4.0 in 2010, with the goal of delivering short link URLs and small quantities of analog data rather than live video and music. It is dubbed Low power because the protocol has been modified to be less battery-intensive, which offers up a wide range of options. A beacon is a piece of hardware that sends a Bluetooth Low Energy signal to a Bluetooth-enabled receiver, allowing another device to detect the transmitter’s proximity. When we talk about machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, we are referring to Beacons Technology BLE communication.
A Beacon does not load information; instead, it sends out a signal that allows the user’s phone or tablet to determine how close the Beacon is. The assets (for example, a discount, promotion, or voucher) will be provided solely to the user application (for example, the Facebook Beacon app distributes Facebook advertisements in the relevant region). Due to the limitations of GPS in interior contexts, such as the inability to navigate or find using GPS, Beacon and BLE have been merged.
How Do Beacons Work?
The Beacon gadget is quite straightforward. Each device is equipped with a CPU, a radio, and a battery, and it operates by continually transmitting an identification (ID). This identifier is detected by your device, which is often a cell phone, and identifies a crucial location in the surroundings. The Identifier is a one-of-a-kind ID number that only the Beacon can recognize. Beacons, when combined with an enterprise software development solution, enable indoor people tracking to increase on-premises security as well as asset tracking. When Beacons Technology is linked, it will execute whatever function that has been programmed into it, such as advertising, navigation, and tracking.
The functioning mechanism of Beacon is a mini-computer the size of a Wi-Fi router. It is an interior navigation system that uses proximity technology to detect human presence and conduct predefined actions in order to provide contextual, instructive, and personalized experiences. When a user goes around the interior navigation area, When the system is found, the Beacon will SMS a code to the user’s mobile device.
We may look at a nice example of mall advertising:
Step 1: Users search for “Red Lipstick” on Google.
Step 2: Your Google search advertisement appears.
Step 3: The user clicks on the search ad, browses the product, and then visits the store to inspect it.
Step 4: Customers decide they want to try on shoes before purchasing, so they visit your store.
Step 5: When they enter the store, their phone acquires a Beacon ID identifying number.
Step 6: Beacon identifies this phone as the one that clicked on their search ad and correlates this information with your Google account Ads count as a visit to a website.
This technology assists you in understanding the effect and performance of your search advertisements by monitoring physical shop visits from your search ads. If you discover that they are delivering a significant amount of traffic to your business, you may wish to increase your investment in search and media advertising.
Classification of Beacon
IBeacon is a Bluetooth Low Energy protocol introduced by Apple in December 2013. It is the first certified set of BLE protocols that almost all beacons accept. This protocol is only supported on iOS, however, it is now quite easy to find. On Android, several API calls enable searching for Beacons. To find Beacons Technology and conduct activities on them, an application is necessary. Beacons Technology offers two kinds of monitoring interactions: monitoring and ranging. The app will notify even if monitoring mode is switched off, whereas range mode only functions while the app is active. What data will the iBeacon beacons emit? They sent out three different messages: UUID, Major, and Minor. Never will two beacons have the same UUID, Major, or Minor of Beacons Technology.
Eddystone is a Bluetooth Low Energy protocol that was released by Google in July 2015 and is now officially supported on both iOS and Android systems. It is an open protocol that accepts a wide range of information and data packets. Eddystone, unlike iBeacon, only enables one fundamental basic interaction — the “Eddystone discovery,” which is equivalent to iBeacon ranging of Beacons Technology. This interaction is represented by three distinct data packet types: the Eddystone UID, the Eddystone URL, and the Eddystone TLM. The Eddystone UID is a data packet that can cause push notifications or app actions to be triggered.
The Eddystone URL, on the other hand, delivers a genuine URL. The data is straightforward and does not require the use of an app to function. Finally, Eddystone TLM is used to manage beacons and provides data such as battery and voltage, beacon temperature, and number of beacons. of packages sent, and beacon uptime. TLM is delivered with the other two packet types and serves as beacon meta-data.
Where is the Application of Beacon?
Because Beacons Technology is expected to grow rapidly in the future, its use is still in its early stages. For the time being, the primary focus is on navigation and advertising. Companies are now spending considerably in this area.
Overall, Beacon has a wide range of applications in a variety of sectors and fields:
- Manufacturing
- Supply Chain Administration
- Restaurant Hotel Wholesale, retail/commercial
- Traveling, Education, Health Care
Although proximity marketing and inventory management are two of the most popular sectors for small and medium-sized business owners, other sub-segments are rapidly growing. The following sub-sectors have the most potential for growth:
Cloud: Cloud-based beacons assist businesses in Beacons Technology managing different cloud-hosted services utilized on smart devices. They cut expenses while protecting infrastructure.
Education: Bluetooth low-energy beacon technology enables dynamic learning zones and simple attendance.
Wi-Fi: Beacon hardware paired with Wi-Fi-based sensors helps clients locate their destination while lowering business infrastructure expenses.
Big Data sets are used to forecast and uncover trends in human behavior. This is where indoor positioning and placement may assist anything from marketing to organizations to better comprehend and respond to difficult circumstances. Here’s an example of how Beacons Technology in Beacon fits into the Big Data landscape of an employee management company.
An employee is given an ID card that may be used for a variety of purposes.
- Examine attendance, admission, and exit.
- When they are available in the cafeteria, deliver lunch to their account.
- Illness leave
- Reserve a meeting space
- Heatmap evaluation
- When there is a fire, explosion, or disaster in the structure, navigating and guiding are required.
- Factory movement, process management
The data collected from a person – that person’s ID, for example -The organization can combine information about their movements and interactions with other members of their workforce. It is therefore possible to determine whether this individual can request a seat change to be closer to another member of the group, whether the feared sickness will limit their food, whether they will need a cab since they work late, and whether they will require a higher meeting budget.
Another example is tracking the movement of workers in the manufacturing process in a plant; we can measure and analyze the optimized working process, but we cannot apply approaches to more optimized work. This necessitates long-term data collecting and analysis.
Conclusion
Therefore, what are the prospects for Beacon technology? As previously said, the industry is expected to be highly valuable in the next years. However, from a broader perspective, Beacon Technology is poised to take over virtually all aspects of the retail and transportation sectors in the future.
More than that, we’ve found that beacon technology has a significant impact on marketing. There have been various occasions when firms have employed beacons to observe client patterns of behavior in order to improve their branding. After all, Beacons technology requires little investment, is simple to put up and administer regardless of business size, and provides clear, simple benefits to Beacons Technology businesses across sectors. So why not?
