At Burkhart, we love our digital and mobile marketing toolbox. Hootsuite, Google Analytics, WordPress, salesforce.com, MailChimp – there are so many that we use every day.

But digital marketing is constantly evolving, especially for franchise businesses.

As we develop new channels and technology, like those related to uniting online and in-store experiences, we need to continually update our digital toolbox.

Here’s the updated marketing toolbox – everything you’ll need for the new mobile marketing world.

1. Pulsate

Pulsate is a Software as a Service (SaaS) company specializing in geo-fencing for apps.

Geo-fencing is when you define an area on, say Google Maps. Then, when a customer with your franchise’s app enters that area, you are able to track them or target them with ads.

Pulsate works within your existing app and can create an area for you and then manage tracking customers. This gives you a lot of information and helps you to understand which customers are coming, staying, leaving and how frequently they visit. The software also lets you send notifications to help drive customer engagement.

2. QR Stuff

QR Stuff is an outrageously low-budget website that lets you create QR codes that go to specific URLs which happen to include tags for tracking in Google Analytics. While QR codes have been around a while, they haven’t caught on as well as everyone predicted. However, with better phones and the fact that you don’t need a special QR app anymore, and better mobile data, we think it’s time to give them another try (especially when you couple it with a custom landing page).

3. Unbounce

Unbounce lets you create custom landing pages quickly and easily, and test them to see how they perform.

This means you can have different landing pages for different QR codes, or other calls to action you have in place, to drive customers to places and see how different campaigns perform.

4. Unitag

Unitag is a service specializing in near field communication (NFC) and they offer a free trial to customers for the first 50 uses.

They send you NFC stickers and help you develop the supporting software to actually use them. Plus, they have an analytics dashboard to actually track and optimize your NFC campaigns.

5. Atlas RFID

Atlas RFID is an online tech hardware store that sells (among other things) the hardware you need for NFCs. A customizable Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tag starts at around $24 and is all the hardware you need to enable your in-store marketing campaigns.

The potential for this sort of brand marketing is staggering.

For example, you might do what a music store in Tokyo did; they put NFC tags on each piece of clothing in their store. Then when customers were trying on clothes, a certain type of music was piped into the changing rooms.

Obviously, this is a small-scale solution. However, for a modest investment, it gives you the opportunity to trial NFC in-store and to see what results you get before you fully flesh out an expensive marketing plan.

Conclusion

The next wave of omni-channel marketing engagement is upon us as digital marketing campaigns strive to integrate virtual and real experiences.

Whether you’re a franchise or a local chain, these tools can help you drive customer engagement in-store and create an optimal customer experience.

And who doesn’t want that?