Well, you spent money setting it up; you might as well make some money with it, right?
It’s not wrong to think about monetizing your social Wi-Fi platform. Your guest Wi-Fi solution could be a lucrative source of income if you do it right. Several companies like yours are making money enough to pay for the maintenance of their platform.
In this article, we will show you three major ways to monetize your social Wi-Fi.
Before we talk about monetising your Wi-Fi platform there are certain factors you have to consider. These factors will help you know which monetising method is best for your type of business. They include:
Customer profile:
the type of customers your business caters for determines which of the three methods you should use. You should answer questions such as: Are your customers wealthy or average? Are they old or young? What kind of lifestyle do they live?
See 3 things Wi-Fi analytics can show you about your customers to know the types of data you can collect with your Wi-Fi platform.
Bandwidth size:
the size of your bandwidth will determine how Wi-Fi network your platform can accommodate. Is your bandwidth large enough to handle the network load?
Business location:
Is your business situated in a business district? And do you have a lot of other businesses around you who are willing to pay you to place adverts on your splash page?
Once you have put all three of these factors into consideration, you can then choose which of the following is best for you.
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Paid Wi-Fi Service
You must be wondering, ‘Why call it free Wi-Fi if customers still have to pay for it?’
And you are right to ask.
Free Wi-Fi is one amenity that is most sought after and introducing a paid Wi-Fi service can scare off your customers.
However, here are two strategies you can implement that would help you run a paid Wi-Fi service and still keep your customers.
The tiered system strategy:
Many businesses use this strategy to make money from their Wi-Fi platform. In this strategy, you create different Wi-Fi service (paid) packages for your customers. You could label them Basic and Premium or whatever terms you please.You offer the Basic package free of charge and charge for the Premium package. These premium packages could contain benefits like higher browsing speed or some additional browsing privileges. For example, you can offer speeds of 1 or 2 mbps on the Basic package and speeds of say 5 mbps on the Premium package.
Another example is that you can use browsing limitations in each package. Like allowing social media, simple Google searches, emails, instant chats, and light downloads in the Basic package. While in the Premium package you can allow unlimited downloads and video streaming amongst other things.
Timed usage: In this strategy, you offer free Wi-Fi for a limited amount of time, say 2 hours, and then afterwards charge a per hour/day fee for your Wi-Fi. This way, you get your customers hooked and more likely to pay when the ‘free time’ expires. This method would work well if your customers are young people, especially tourists who would want to take pictures of their trip and post it online.
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Running Sponsored Ads
This method is fairly easy to understand and implement.
It works in the same way as Facebook ads. If you have fairly large crowd of customers, you can get businesses with related (but not competing) products to place their ads on your splash screen.
For instance, if you run a hotel but do not have an onsite spa, you could have a nearby spa place ads on your splash page to engage your customers. Your prices can range from $50 to $100 per ad depending on the types of business you are dealing with.
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Display Onsite Amenities
Do you have a newly built spa onsite? Or have a new recipe? You can display these on your authentication page or your splash screen to get your customers interested.
You could also run promos like offering free items or service for every purchase of $X.XX made. This way, you could charge more for a regular item or service by getting customers in with free giveaways.
These three methods work well when done properly. They are being used by businesses around the world who offer free Wi-Fi service. If you have any questions on how you can use SponOn’s Wi-Fi platform to make more money, shoot us a question through our contact us page and we will get back to you shortly.
You could also request a free demo to see how our platform works.
POSTED ON May 21, 2019Share:
