Augmented Reality (AR) advertising is a sustainable marketing tool used to improve customer experience of brand interaction. Using AR ads, marketers encourage people to discover more about a product. Brands can create unforgettable customer experiences where users don’t just focus on product qualities but on their own perceptions of it. This makes AR reality marketing a big help during the pre-sales stage of products when both the emotional and rational level of the decision making process is affected.
Augmented reality has been already used for toys, games, entertainment, publishing and other industries. AR ad campaigns are successful due to several reasons, such as:
-
- Affordability. In 2017, all that customers need to run an AR are an app and a smartphone (or some other smart device with a camera and a wide screen that can detect a box and display what’s inside). To run a campaign, companies will need quality 3D models and a reliable development team who can convert marketers’ ideas into seamless User Experience.
- Availability as a benefit. Customers do not need to run to shopping malls to hold the desired thing in their hands. They launch a special app, download a marker, and that’s it! They just start interacting with the desired item when and where they want. For example; furniture manufacturers can allow customers to try out various furniture at their homes to see how it fits in with the room before purchasing or moving anything heavy.
- Improved experience onsite. AR ads inside brick-and-mortar shops can be used to show how the things work on wide screens – the camera detects the package in the customer’s hand and the screen displays how big a toy is in reality or how large the collection is where the toy belongs to.
Before planning an AR marketing campaign, the marketing team must first be aware that they’ve picked up the right experiences with the right audience.
Here’s what must be considered when planning an AR advertising app:
- Focus on your audience. How old are they? How much do they enjoy using mobile apps? How much do they know about augmented reality?
- Offer something that the audience really needs. Make sure that the app solves the audience’s problem in lesser steps. So, open the app, choose a model, enjoy the game, subscribe for notifications/pre-order/buy a product/etc. This will save time on decision making.
- Testing the app on the focus group Further discussion of the results are highly recommended. The result of picking up the wrong audience will be of little to no interest to the app and/or product. Frustration due to the app being too complex for non tech-savvy audience will not garner any useful results.
In 2017, AR apps should be an integral part of marketing strategies. Certainly, the AR ad is not the recipe for success, but it makes a big difference in bringing fun and helping to accomplish usual things in lesser steps.
