Below is advice how you can take advantage of augmented reality when developing your marketing strategy.
1. Get Creative
In the age of augmented reality, all marketers need to be focused on being ahead of the game. Are you a service-based business? Can you create an augmented tutorial of your services? Are you an e-commerce company? Can you have a 360-augmented view of your products? Let your product or service guide your strategy.
2. Provide A Firsthand Product Experience
IKEA perfectly incorporates AR into its marketing strategy to give customers a firsthand look at how any product will fit into their home. The same could be used for e-commerce platforms looking to provide firsthand experiences using products that you could only get in a brick-and-mortar establishment.
3. Let Your Strategy Define Your Applications
If you have a strong strategy, creativity will find a way to unleash itself into available media options that are accessible to your target. Apple didn’t invent a new technology, it accelerated its reach to everyday consumers. Marketers will now be able to justify learning the stack and truly understand the options AR can offer; a sizable portion of their target will soon have access to AR.
4. Preview The Product Virtually
Businesses can use augmented reality to let users preview, interact and experience the product or service before they actually step foot in the store — like a nail salon, having people try on nail colors before they get a manicure.
5. Build Hyper-Relevant Experiences
Apple’s ARKit will usher in an entirely new era in mobile. For brands/developers, this means the opportunity to create hyper-relevant experiences. From the most basic augmentations of physical spaces to something like Snapchat’s Jeff Koons global scavenger hunt, the new iPhone will challenge developers and creatives to rethink the static UX/UI of existing apps.
6. Focus On Consumers
While this concept has been around since the ’80s, the technology is still not consumer-friendly. Other than Pokémon GO and a handful of other apps, AR has made little to no dent in the consumer market. Developers can take advantage of AR by focusing on integrating with people’s lives (be it Yelp with AR or an AR social network). The market’s growth will quickly follow.
7. Use It With Careful Consideration
ARKit makes it easier than ever for developers to create AR experiences. However, this can be easily abused. Any developer can drop a 3-D model into an augmented view, so they need to focus on creating an entertaining, engaging or useful experience that will stand out from the oncoming flood of AR apps.
8. Be Useful
AR objects will be tested by many and will quickly reach a point of commoditization. To stand out now and in the future, be useful. Help a person visualize a new purchase, try out a new look, give more information or entertain their friends.
9. Create Something Functional
Some of the most profitable people during the Gold Rush were those who sold pickaxes. Rather than trying to build the next Pokémon game, think of designing functional applications that ease people into this new notion of using AR in ways that enhance their otherwise mundane experiences.
10. Enjoy Experiential Fashion
The biggest opportunity has to be for apparel. AR could be the e-commerce equivalent of a fitting room. Warby Parker recognized that people need to see what they look like in glasses before they will make a purchase and they were early adopters of a webcam AR solution on their e-commerce site. What is one storytelling tip you have for young brands to make their stories and purpose more memorable?
11. Try Experiential Marketing
The new augmented reality for the iPhone is a great opportunity for a brand to utilize this with experiential marketing. Consumers are spending on experiences, and if you can create an experience around this new feature while staying super relevant with new technologies, I see this as a huge win for brands.
12. Enhance Brand Experiences
For the brand experience industry, AR can take mobile apps to the next level for live events. By recognizing objects around an area, we can feed attendees with sponsor updates, booth locations, activities, speakers, product displays and social profiles of other attendees. Mobile devices could even act as wayfinders by recognizing where attendees are in the 3-D space and guiding them through it.
13. Push Boundaries
Augmented reality can really help push the boundaries for brands. In particular, business-to-consumer brands can get creative with how they get potential customers to engage. IKEA is the perfect example of this — the IKEA app utilizes augmented reality to allow users to view a piece of furniture in their house or apartment, which can be a major influence in a purchase decision.
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