Exploring Social AR Marketing: Engaging Consumers with Immersive Experiences

For anyone wanting to enter the world of marketing, the topics to understand used to be ‘brand loyalty’, ‘sales volume’, and ‘market research’. But any marketer that wants to distinguish themselves these days has a new challenge. You need to keep up with the trends of how technology is influencing marketing, especially with Social AR.

Features like AR (augmented reality) and marketing via influencers on social media have become the norm—and integral to many companies success. So, how familiar are you with this and do you want to learn skills that will help set a marketing campaign apart from the rest?

We discuss important perspectives of this new approach to advertising.

From Online Shopping to Social Shopping

Instead of brick-and-mortar stores, more and more people are using online shopping as their go-to shopping method. It’s been a growing trend, with experts believing e-commerce sales can grow as much as 10% per year.

However, there’s a new trend becoming a major role player for those offering goods online. It’s called social shopping, which refers to the activity of buying an item found on a social media platform, rather than by browsing a specific vendor’s website.

With social shopping, the content will instantly navigate to a product page if buyers decide to click. In 2021, this type of selling already carried a value of over $36 billion in the US.

This makes the quality of any company’s social media content especially important. If sellers don’t impress with what they deliver to these social media communities, they’ll lose sales!

Tech That Benefits Marketing

Luckily, there is a lot of technology that marketers can utilize to upscale their content. Consider the following:

• Video: Simply by adding video to social content, you create a more realistic display of a product or service. Also, consumers are much more likely to notice content with videos compared to text.
• The power of VR and AR technology: AR and VR take the experience of shopping to an entirely new level! Marketers can offer 3D experiences of products, buyers can get an idea of what they would look like wearing a piece of clothing or confirm whether furniture would fit well in their homes. All of this can be viewed and experienced as augmented or virtual reality scenarios via mobile devices.
• Easy access to social platforms: Technology also facilitates easy access to information—including social media platforms—across the globe. With fast internet connections being implemented, even in less developed countries, it creates an efficient communication tool.
• Mobile access: Thanks to internet connections and small, affordable devices like mobile phones even consumers without computers can now access the World Wide Web, see marketing material and place product orders.
• Communication between buyers and sellers: Clients have an efficient channel to provide feedback—complaints or compliments—to sellers. Whether it’s an online review, or asking a question on social media, vendors and customers can easily engage, which is an efficient tool companies can use to build trust with their audience and secure more sales. If a customer knows they can keep vendors accountable, they’re more likely to buy. Also, other consumers will use these reviews from their peers to help them decide which items to buy, so sellers can use positive reviews to their advantage.

Features of a Quality, Modern Marketing Campaign

Of course, certain elements of marketing will always apply. But do take note of what modern marketing campaigns should incorporate to really make an impact online.

Market Research

Whether you’re writing a product description or adding text to a video, market research is essential. The information you cover must speak to the end-user’s needs in order to be relevant. These days, you also need to consider the target audience’s needs in terms of:

• Which social media platforms they frequent.
• Devices they’re more likely to use for online or social shopping, so you tailor your campaign around it. For example, someone using a desktop computer will scroll differently to someone using a mobile phone.
• Is your niche audience comfortable using AR or VR yet, or do you need to stick to more familiar formats, like video?

Communication Channels

Since people are spending excessive amounts of time on social media, companies must consider it as an advertising marketplace. Through social selling you can gather many more leads than usual and simplify shopping. Remember, for a society who is used to fast food and quick access to information, making shopping quick and easy will also lead to higher engagement.

Also review who you choose as spokesperson for your brand. It’s always valuable to partner with other respected brands, but these days many demographics follow influencers on social media when they need advice. Finding someone to showcase a service or product on Instagram is usually money well spent.

AR and VR Elements

VR and AR marketing can build trust in the product, because the buyer has a much better idea of what he or she is getting for the price they’re paying. Thanks to immersive experiences, there’s a much higher likelihood of them committing to the purchase.

People may even prefer shopping from vendors who provide AR marketing features, whether on a website or as part of social shopping. This is because they feel they’re making more informed decisions when spending their money.

As a result, having AR and VR experiences as part of any marketing campaign is swiftly becoming a non-negotiable element. Designing for AR based ads is a feature advertising teams must cater and budget for.

Note: as mentioned, do research to ensure your specific audience is comfortable using this advanced technology for shopping purposes.

Who Will Fill the Gap?

It’s clear how valuable insight into modern technology like AR can be to boost companies’ sales. An immersive experience facilitated by this type of technology can lead to more customer engagement that usually results in much higher sales. However, having knowledge of this tech hasn’t been a traditional feature of marketing teams.

Now, thanks to the developments in the current advertising industry, those with a passion for design have more career opportunities. Even for those interested in game development and AR/VR courses there may be interesting applications of the knowledge they acquire.

Apart from catering for the entertainment industry—a common niche for AR and VR applications—students that have completed and AR course of similar training can enter the exciting world of marketing. Thanks to valuable skills the modern advertising world desperately needs, finding a position may be much easier than one thinks.

Final Thoughts

Being ready for the future of marketing may require an entire overhaul of the industry, but also an adjustment in the training new hopefuls need to go through.

Having a skillset of understanding the audience, along with AR marketing or knowing how to use XR immersive elements to create mind-blowing social selling content could be the X-factor that gets a rookie a job. Also, having such a person on the team could be the USP for marketing companies, that gets clients to trust them with future campaigns.

AR filters are transforming the landscape of Social Media marketing, and you have the opportunity to join this groundbreaking revolution. Discover in our upcoming blog post how you can craft your very own filter. To delve deeper into this topic, we invite you to read our next article: How to get started in creating your own AR Filters for Social Media