Since the past few years, Augmented Reality has become a buzzword in the technology world. Even after not being so familiar with this jargon, many of us make this phrase pave its way into our lives by gushing over the Pokemon Go game or those mushy animated filters in Snapchat or Instagram.
However, AR is just not about games or entertainment, but it already showed its potential among diversified verticals- education, healthcare, industrial, and retail, to name a few.
Along with the paradigm-shifting change in the technology world, people’s perspectives and expectations have changed drastically. With the increasing expectation of personalized experience among the consumers and dealing with a generation who mostly spend their time on devices with a minimal attention span, marketing campaigns for the brands are becoming ever challenging! And, to grab the shrinking attention of these device-oriented consumers to satisfy their personalization urge, AR is the most effective way.
What is AR?
The 'Augment' word is derived from a Latin word that means 'our grid,' i.e., add or increase. AR mixes the real world with computer technology-generated virtual objects without cutting you off entirely from the real world, unlike Virtual reality. AR augments your real world with supplemented images.
How AR’s impacting Businesses:
It allows brands to provide customers unique personalized experiences just by a few taps on their mobile screen.
From testing makeup to try on new clothes or shoes or even test driving or repairing a car is possible through AR.
Here are some intriguing data to further prove AR's effectiveness in marketing and advertising. Researches show that 61% of shoppers prefer retailers that offer AR over those that don't. 68% of shoppers spent more time with products if AR was available, and 72% of shoppers purchased items they had not planned to buy because of AR.
Reasons to implement AR in Marketing:
AR makes advertising interactive and reaches out to consumers in a new way. Here’re some broad reasons to make AR a part of your next marketing campaign.
Connect with the Consumers: AR ads are immersive. The marketers can make an emotional connection with the customers through interactive and lifelike AR ads. For instance, a passer-by can come across a billboard hoarding of a newly-released movie, and he/she can enjoy the trailer right there just holding their smartphone cameras at the billboard; the rest of the work will be done by the AR.
Imagine how engaging that would be and how it can boost the marketing of the movie?
Affordable and Immersive: Though it depends on what type of AR ad you’re developing for your brand, in general, an AR advertising campaign is usually cheaper than a print ad in a best-selling print magazine, and it has vast usability than the print media.
Try before Buy: One of the primary reasons to implement AR in your business is that it allows users to try on products before buying them virtually. For example, you're buying a pair of glasses or sunglasses, or buying a pair of shoes. How convenient it would be to try it virtually to test its suitability on you and then buy. Brands like Lenskart and Lacoste are already implementing this model. Lacoste brings the opportunity to try on its shoes virtually, and from the former's app, you can try on the specs before you spend on it! One of the firsts to implement AR in their marketing strategy, IKEA gives users a real-time experience by showing how a particular piece of furniture would look in their space by yielding a 3-D picture virtually. By providing personalized experiences like this, the brand would enhance its customer acquisition funnel every time.
Making life easier: AR is making people’s lives continuously easier. Not only it’s helping the consumers to have an engaging shopping experience but it’s able to provide necessary support as well. For example, the Volkswagon Mota app provides an AR implementation to show how to repair your car!
Boosting Hyperlocal Advertising: There’re two significant types of AR- Marker-Based and Location-Based. The first one requires a target image that customers can scan with their phones and bring virtual content to life, and the latter one doesn’t require any target image; with the help of GPS, it overlays virtual content based on a user’s location. For example, an AR application can show you the nearby Starbucks locations in front of you just by analyzing your present site! How cool is that!
The pandemic in 2020 brought some considerable changes in overall lifestyle. Not only are people habituated to a work-from-home lifestyle, but every tiny sector has shifted to the digital world. From the classroom to grocery shopping, everything can be summed up in a small handheld device. Where the digital world can be extremely overwhelming at times and can burden you with flooding information, on the other hand, the consumers are grasping for breath for fresh air amidst this, and nothing but a personalized experience can bring that. AR is that fresh air that can connect to the consumers without interacting personally. The worldwide market size of AR is likely to go up to $198billion in 2025. With this vast prospect, AR in marketing is undoubtedly the next big thing.