How Wi-Fi marketing works

Guest Wi-Fi is a service customers want and a marketing channel for you. Here is how the two connect.

Wi-Fi marketing is simple in principle: you offer free guest Wi-Fi, and in exchange you learn who your guests are and how to reach them again. The term often gets a blank stare from business owners who have not come across it, but the mechanics are straightforward. For a cafe, pub, restaurant or hotel, it bridges the gap between the visit and everything that could bring the guest back.

How Wi-Fi marketing works

The setup starts with your own Wi-Fi coverage, ideally contained within your venue. Anyone with a Wi-Fi-enabled device, meaning most of your guests, can see and connect to the network.

When a guest joins, they are redirected to a splash page: a sign-in screen carrying your branding and the terms of use. Most Wi-Fi marketing companies let you customise that page, so it feels like part of the venue rather than an advert wall. To get online, the guest registers with an email address or a social account, and you can prompt for other useful details at the same time. Once they have agreed, they are connected, and you decide what access they get and any limits on it. That is the point where the marketing starts.

With their permission, the details they gave you feed straight into your marketing. The platform can point guests to your social profiles, tell them when a promotion is running, store visit data for a loyalty scheme, and track trends in what your regulars are really after, so you can give them more of it and give them a reason to come back.

One of the biggest novelties of hotspot marketing is that you are also providing a service guests genuinely want. Free Wi-Fi that is faster than their mobile data saves them money and keeps them comfortable, which keeps them in the venue longer.

What the venue gets out of it

For the guest, it:

• Is convenient. A venue network is often faster than mobile data, so guests browse freely and save on their data allowance.

• Improves the visit. People who are comfortable stay longer, and guests who stay longer order more.

For the venue, it:

• Increases sales. The longer guests stay, the more they spend, and the more likely they are to notice something they would have missed on the way out. It also gives your team more time to do what it does best.

• Builds understanding of your guests. Every connection adds data about who visits, when, and how often. That insight tells you what is working in the venue, and if you run more than one site, you can compare them side by side.

• Grows an audience. Collecting email addresses and social details gives you a permission-based audience to market to, with insight into their behaviour behind it. If your business has been offline until now, this guide to building an email list for a non-digital business walks through the basics.

• Feeds promotions. From a message on the splash page to targeted email and SMS campaigns, the data you capture gives your promotions a real audience instead of a guess. Venues also use it for decisions like layout and menu changes, because the data shows what guests actually do rather than what you assume they do.

Who offers Wi-Fi marketing

Plenty of marketing companies now offer some version of this, so it is worth knowing what to look for. The useful ones connect the Wi-Fi login to everything else: the guest profile, the marketing, the loyalty and the reporting, in one place rather than four. Check too that the service works with the network hardware you already have, and that you can export the guest data you collect.

That is what Stampede's guest Wi-Fi does. Guests connect once and are recognised on every return visit. Their details land on a guest profile you own, and your marketing runs from the same data automatically. It works the same whether you run one coffee shop or a group of venues.

If you want to see it working on your own network, get in touch and we will walk you through it, from the first splash page to the first campaign.