Augmented Reality will become a decisive tool for digital marketing
AR helps Customers make decision
Augmented Reality is a great tool for integrated marketing. It could seamlessly cooperate with offline marketing, out of home campaign, App marketing, QR code, email campaign, and brand interaction. Brands can easier entertain customers with more specific information to attract them to interact. Thus, since many brands have their own apps, they can plug the AR function and collect individual user interactive data to better understand prospects' behaviors and find out the decisive reasons in purchase decision. For example, Timberland made an AR campaign to allow people “try on” the product in front of the store. Once the camera tracked a person’s face, he or she can try on Timberland’s clothes in a simulative background without entering the store. People can directly know if the clothes fit them well with the specific environment that they want. If people feel good about the clothes, they can send the product code to their emails. Let’s imagine, if this campaign happens on a busy street or sets in a bus station, the camera identifies a man, who may have installed Timberland’s app in his phone, knows his gender and age, shows him how he looks like if he wears the brand’s new arrival clothes. He is likely to show intent to interact with ads. Once he finds something amazes him, he can scan the QR code and the clothes will automatically put into his shopping cart. What he is going to do is to check out and wait for his clothes. No need to explain more, a purchase email should be sent at the same time. BTW, the possibility of return could reduce by AR because he knows exactly how it would look like.
AR helps Brands understand customers
Brands are able to track people who interact with the AR campaign especially if they scan the code and build up a holistic customer profile: location, gender, age, favorite clothes, jobs (from the simulative environment), income level (clothes level), and family status (if the camera is powerful enough to capture who they are with). As soon as the brands have individual profile, they can utilize big data to simulate a lot of messages, such as what clothes should send to individual or the frequency of following emails to optimize the email campaign. Since preferences are easier to be tracked via AR, brands can utilize a lot based on the data. Everyone has different preference and wants to be treated differently. People want to be seemed differently. It is hard for brands to reach out everyone differently by now, but the possibility would come out from AR. When AR marketing brings entertaining information, people are more likely to share their preferences with or talk to the brands.
AR improve Digital Marketing
To achieve these, AR needs more technical efforts and marketers need to create new digital metrics, such as the number of times that AR is triggered and the length of time that people interact with AR. The more marketers can learn from AR, the more likely that they can create personalized profile for each customer. Big data are necessary for AR marketing, which will improve digital marketing a lot. Currently, everyone is treated similarly, getting same information. If AR and big data can actually participate in digital marketing, individuals will be treated and evaluated more like a real person. Since brand can understand each person, ads can be specific and don’t need to be hard sell any more. Promotional ads won’t be annoying, social media posts won’t be boring or irrelevant, and emails won’t be general and meaningless.