With the holiday shopping season in the rearview mirror, where do strategies for beacons go from here? With beacon advertising and marketing platforms proliferating, how do brands and agencies decide which one is best for them and why?  This panel of experts defines the key ingredients for a solid beacon strategy taking into account the learnings from beaconing to-date. How do marketers solve the problem of insuring mobile shoppers have their Bluetooth connections turned on and the correct apps in their phones' libraries? Merchants can use beaconing for customer acquisition customer retention or both, begging the question of whether or not beacon recognition should be included within the retailer’s app. This panel takes on the complex beaconing issues of brands going direct, retailers aggregating brands and outside apps taking advertising revenue while being used in someone else’s store.

Research consistently shows that mobile shoppers are swayed by coupons and deals. There are various ways to deliver deals by beacon, including scratch-off codes, full-screen coupons and precise location-based offers. Supermarket chains have been fine-tuning coupon targeting for decades, well before beaconing. We’ve asked these experts to take on the issue of what can be migrated to a beaconed environment and what new twists can be added. They will help clarify the line between the creepy and cool side of beaconing and take a look at which incentives can keep consumers coming back without skimming profit margins.

Advertising on the relatively small smartphone screen has hardly been a hit to date. Once initiated by a beacon signal, what creative will work best? What is the role of post-beaconing, such as sending ad messaging well after leaving a store? What about using past beaconing knowledge to drive foot traffic back to a store? What are consumer expectations from in-store engagements? What future creative options might be used to catch the shopper’s eye? Three creative minds discuss the best beacon-triggered creative approaches for in-store mobile marketing and mobile advertising.

In one of the first nationwide beacon deployments, Hillshire Brands found that purchase intent increased 20 times for those exposed to beacon-triggered messages in grocery stores. And that was just the beginning, slightly ahead of the merger of Tyson Foods with Hillshire, David Ervin, VP, Marketing Services at Tyson, and Chris Hiland, Chief Growth Officer at its agency BPN, will discuss how beacons and geo-targeting are changing how brands interact with their consumers and provide some insights Hillshire has learned along the way.

One of the key questions in any beacon deployment is identifying the source of the payback. Aside from purchasing and installing beacons, agencies and brands need to define the goals ... ranging from increasing product awareness to actual purchases. Complexities include linkage to legacy point of sales systems and loyalty programs and the cost of sales staff training. Open and click through rates are barely table stakes with beacons. This panel defines the new beacon metrics.