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Improve Engagement with AR

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At Plattar, we know that customer engagement is a key metric in every marketing strategy. The more engaged your customers are with your brand, the easier it is to make sales and build loyalty. It’s easy to see why new technologies are incorporated in marketing strategies to increase customer engagement.

Augmented Reality (AR) does just that. It allows users to interact with digital assets that are placed on top of the real world – normally through their smartphone cameras in an augmented reality app. Unlike almost all other technologies it shifts control of the marketing experience from the brand to the buyer, exponentially increasing customer engagement.

It’s that fundamental shift that is putting AR in the cross hairs of so many of the world’s businesses both large and small. Let’s take a look at the effect that integrating AR into your customer experience can have.

Show Customers Exactly What They Are Missing

Your products look great in store and on your website right? But how will they look in your customer’s home or office? As Steve Jobs famously said, “People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Though the exact application of that statement is debatable, it reveals a marketing principle that augmented reality can help you to exploit. The appeal of the eyes.

Not all of your customers are able to visualise your products in situ and they need to see what they’re getting in order to make a purchase. In most cases, buyers make up their minds after physically interacting with a product. Augmented Reality allows your customer to experience your product without visiting your store in person. Think of being able to try on clothes without stepping into a dressing room, or seeing how a rug would look in a room of your house without purchasing it.

This makes it much easier for customers to engage with your brand, and moves them through the purchasing funnel much faster. Heck, they don’t even have to leave their sofas!

Generate a social media-worthy buzz that gains popularity with their friends

Living in the age of social media means people are more likely to do something if it’s “share-worthy” or gives them recognition in their friend-circle. This has shot Snaphat to high use, where you can take photos of the digital assets and yourself in situ and share with your friends.

You can use augmented reality apps to generate a buzz that will create it’s own viral movement on social media, and ultimately drive customer engagement.

This can be done through using the labels of your products as AR triggers. When scanned in an app, these allows users to interact with your company’s product.

An example of this is the Hell Pizza’s Zombies from Hell game we built, that set us on our Plattar journey. After purchasing a pizza, the customer would be encouraged to download the app and point their device at their newly purchased pizza box to unlock the zombie shooter. What better way to eat your pizza than while playing a 3D game! It was a huge success for the pizza company as it gamified the purchasing of further pizzas to their target audience of gamers and drove thousands upon thousands of social media posts.

Augmented reality is on the rise

This year has been a massive year so far with Apple launching ARKit (due to go live in October 2017). This is a very powerful tool to deliver Augmented Reality through iOS apps and devices. Pre-launch, it has set alive the internet with some really creative content. Come October, brands will be demanding AR from their agencies.

Beyond Apple, Facebook, Google and many of the other tech giants are in the middle of rolling out their AR strategies. The mobile augmented reality market is expected to hit USD 117.40 billion by 2022. Smartphone applications will hold a very large part of this market share particularly over the next 2-3 years, making them a valuable marketing tool.

Very soon we can expect augmented reality to become a part of everyday life and in turn nearly every marketing campaign, and at that time it will have paid off to have started incorporating it right now.

Augmented reality is the key to high customer engagement now, and a critical component for the foreseeable future.

All of these are reasons on why I set out to create Plattar as “The World’s Simplest Augmented Reality Creator”, so Get Started.

I am always open to chat about your Augmented Reality idea, so feel free to reach out!