Today I want to talk to you about how to get the best out of your Wi-Fi.

If you’ve got Wi-Fi in your business and you use it purely for business, you then have got to make a decision whether you are going to make Wi-Fi available to your customers or you’re gonna keep it purely for your business so just for your business to use and for the back-offices to use.

There are two schools of thought, most places will offer some sort of free Wi-Fi, for their customers however there are also some pubs that have decided that social media is actually killing conversation so they’ve taken a business decision to ban the use of phones and the internet within their pub as far as the public facing side of it goes. That’s a purely business decision.

Now I’m going to talk about the venues that have decided to offer Wi-Fi.

I think we’ve all been into places where we’ve gone in there that there was a chalkboard somewhere or a poster up saying they offer free Wi-Fi, and there’s usually the wireless hub name and the wireless key (the password) which is most cases in my experiences some sort of BT hub name with some long unintelligible Wi-Fi code. Which is great that what they’re doing is they’re giving free access to their customers, really great but they’re not making the most of it.

What you can do is you can turn your Wi-Fi into a mini marketing machine.

What does that mean?

By installing guest Wi-Fi, which is wireless access points, you can get your customers still to have free Wi-Fi but you take them on a journey.

So the first thing they might do is they sign on using one of their social media platforms for instance Facebook. You will take them through a sign on page you could take them then for instance through your venues Facebook page and get them to like it. But what you also doing is getting access to all that data which is all GDPR compliant and that Facebook holds on them, so that you could target market them.

You might, for instance, know through those details when their birthday is, so you might send them out an offer, offering a discount for their birthday. You might find from looking at their data that they like football or they like rugby, so if you’ve got a special events on targeting those you can put that out. You can find out what music they like, so if you’ve got a band that meets that criteria you can target them rather than taking a scattergun approach, you can then make your marketing far more targeted and they’re more likely to come out to those events.

So again you’re taking Wi-Fi which you may see just as a cost, you’re flipping it to the other side to make it part of your marketing mix.

So that’s what you can do on a very quick run-through of turning your guest or your free Wi-Fi into a marketing tool.