Four Smart Ways Beacon Technology Helps Museums Create Powerful Branding

One of the most important facets of museum marketing is branding. Hit the mark, and your museum enjoys wide brand recognition which leads to more patrons and extensive press. Miss it, and you may languish in obscurity with low numbers of visitors, no matter how awesome your exhibits are!
Advertisements, whether online or print, can work wonders to create a strong museum brand, but they are often expensive and take a while to return results. This is where beacon technology and proximity marketing can perform splendidly for you.

Museums that are seeking to cultivate and maintain a cohesive, successful brand need to consider proximity marketing. Here are four smart ways for museums to use beacon technology to achieve memorable branding while engaging their patrons and providing a uniquely memorable experience.

Make Selfies Easy

Millennials especially love taking pictures of themselves! Leverage this to expand your branding footprint. Beacon technology engages patrons to take selfies using fun, branded museum frames located directly within the museum’s app. This encourages the patrons to take selfies and share on their social networking channels. The plus side for you is gaining exposure to hundreds, or even thousands, of their followers without spending a dime of your budget.

Selfies are fun and help patrons add another layer of positive visitor experience during their time at the museum. In addition, they work well for museum branding as they are vehicles that allow patrons to market for you.

Speaking of social media channels, beacon technology helps museums create powerful branding by offering ample opportunities

Exhibit Social Sharing

The easier and faster a visitor can post to their social media, the more people that are reached and the stronger and more memorable your museum’s branding becomes. Digging out their smartphones, trying to get on wifi, snapping photos, then going out and posting on social media is a multi-step process that may discourage your visitors from sharing their experience, no matter how awesome it may be. We give the option for patrons to easily share exhibit information on their social network directly through the proximity marketing platform. After all, they already have their phones out to take advantage of information the beacons are pushing to them! This enables them to like, comment and share their views on their respective social platform. This creates increased visibility to the museum’s offering and solidifies branding recognition.

Engage with Surveys

Smart decision makers know the importance of customer feedback. Rather than assume what visitors think and like, hearing directly from them is powerful information and helps productively guide future decisions.

Unfortunately, emailed surveys are typically met with less-than-excited responses. After all, once a person leaves a museum, the memory begins to fade. They may be busy when they receive it and may decide not to fill it out, or complete it halfheartedly with little information. This is where beacon technology can help increase valuable patron feedback. Built directly into the app, a survey can ping visitors’ smartphones at the end of their visit. With everything fresh in their minds, they are more likely to share honest and accurate feedback as to what they enjoyed, and the parts they wish they could see changed and improved.

This type of data gathering assists in building future branding campaigns by helping museum decision makers to know what to focus on to attract their target audiences.

Review and Digest Analytics

Gaining access to your patrons’ feedback is valuable, but that depends largely on whether or not they are honest. Some people answer they like and enjoy something, when in fact they prefer something else entirely. How can you accurately measure their interest and then leverage that into branding opportunities? The simple answer is with beacon technology.

Proximity marketing in museums doesn’t just enrich the customer experience, it also gathers information about their behaviors and actions. From the beacons, museum leaders can access data like how long a person stayed at each exhibit, the demographics of the audience that liked each exhibit best, and which exhibits they skipped altogether. Granular insight like this helps museum decision makers better understand the exhibit types their audience finds interesting so they can add more of them.

Measuring engagement this way and using the points that are working help museums create a long-range brand with wide recognition and stout staying power.
Nailing the right branding image is crucial for museums to attract and appeal to their target markets, increase their number of visitors, and maintain relevance over time. By implementing proximity marketing that features beacon technology, museums are able to drive their branding image, expand it, and capitalize on it both short and long-term.

Have questions about how using beacon technology in museums to create powerful branding? Contact ThinkProxi today and one of our experienced professionals will be happy to consult with you on your specific needs.