When it comes to festivals, concerts and other large events, how you engage with attendees plays a key role in how they’ll enjoy the experience. These days, the extra amenities you provide to your guests greatly influence their decision to return to your recurring event; and one of those amenities should be free guest WiFi.
Customers across industries expect free WiFi as part of their experience. It’s fair for event attendees to expect WiFi since social media is such a large part of their experience. From making social posts to sharing photos and videos, many event-goers have solidified their social profiles as part of their event experience.
Offering basic WiFi is fine for connecting your guest to the internet during your event. After that, it doesn’t provide much of a purpose. By using a Smart WiFi platform, you can market, advertise, and learn about your guests that utilizes your WiFi in ways you never thought possible.
WiFi Marketing
Branding lets you get people visually and psychology accustomed to your business and products. Using WiFi Marketing under a Smart WiFi platform gives you the ability to create a branded log-in experience for your WiFi guests. A captive portal login page, also known as a splash page, is what your users will interact with to gain WiFi access under Smart WiFi.
If your event includes vendors, you can use your branded login page to showcase certain vendors or guest speakers depending on your type of event. Have a concert coming up? Let your attendees know of the different performers by listing them in your log-in page.
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Basic WiFi allows users to access their social profiles, Wifi Marketing works in conjunction with social media profiles by providing sign-in options like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Use this sign-in feature to your advantage to encourage users to like your Facebook page, follow you on Instagrams, and give you an @ shoutout on Twitter.
Email is another potential sign-in option for WiFi users, so you can start an email marketing campaign right from your Smart WiFi platform. Greet attendees with an eye-catching “welcome” email giving them a full rundown of everything planned out for the day. Keep in touch with attendees with well-timed email campaigns encouraging them to return to your event next year.
Smart Tip: Getting your emails into a recipient’s inbox can be a difficult task, especially if you’re unsure on what causes an email to be filtered as spam. Learn how email filtering works and keep your emails out of the spam folder to get the most of your marketing campaigns.
WiFi Advertising
WiFi Advertising is the new way to advertise to people with the ability to interact with them at the same. After a WiFi guest authenticates through WiFi Marketing, WiFi Advertising redirects users to an interactive advertising page. Similar to a splash page, a WiFi Advertising page can be branded to your event but with the addition of interactive ad spaces.
Take your physical ads and put them into a digital space to be seen by WiFi users. The benefit is the ability to add a URL to a specific advertisement. Attendees can click on these ad spaces and be sent to a specific webpage, or social media profile of an advertiser. Advertise vendors, speakers, and even sponsors of your live event with the added benefit of redirecting interested viewers to the web pages of these companies.
You can also track the click-rates of your ad spaces to monitor which advertisers are gaining solid traffic and which others may need to update their ad design to gain more viewerships.
Smart Tip: Get more out your digital marketing efforts with a geofenced advertising campaign. Geofencing lets you create personalized social media advertisements that are targeted to those who enter your WiFi boundary.
WiFi Analytics
Once you are marketing and advertising through your WiFi, the cherry on top is to utilize WiFi Analytics. WiFi Analytics uses your WiFi signal and heat-mapping technology to gather insightful data from attendees such as foot traffic, dwell-times, and behavior trends around a certain area. This is accomplished by the analytics software recognizing the MAC addresses of the devices that come in contact with your WiFi.
These insights are great for learning where your guests prefer to navigate around the property of your event, how long or how short they tend to stay around a certain spot and how many many (or how few) congregate to a certain area.
For events that include vendors, WiFi Analytics is the perfect tool for optimizing vendor placement. Events that use plenty of physical advertising can utilize WiFi analytics to improve signage placement and get advertisements in spots that will actually be seen rather than playing a guessing game.
Have a certain area that is lacking in foot traffic? Look at implementing a new attraction in that dead zone and start engaging with your guests at every point of the property.
Smart Tip: Make sure that your WiFi landscape hits every corner of your event property so that your WiFi Analytics doesn’t miss out on any valuable insights. Knowing what blocks a WiFi signal and how to optimize your WiFi’s reach is important to getting the most out of every feature of a Smart WiFi platform.
Ready to turn your basic WiFi into Smart Wifi? At GoZone, we provide all three platforms of WiFi Marketing, Advertising, and Analytics to help you increase attendee engagement and keep them coming back for years to come.