Why Should Brands Use Social AR for Marketing?
Many don't understand how it works and how should they dive into this technology. Do you have to spend a bomb to get AR content viral? What kind of content can you create to boost your sales and gain more visibility? We will try to answer these questions below.
Here are the main reasons how AR can be effective and why your brand should use it for marketing your business.
Educate with AR
Many brands choose to spread the word about what they do, the process they follow to create their product or simply connect with the audience through AR. If you create a filter that has the company's brand name, explains the services you offer in a fun way, the viewer who liked the effect will be intrigued and more interested in checking out your profile compare to someone who has just viewed a video ad.
Entertain with AR
As the competition in the field of AR increases, the creativity displayed by brands for marketing is getting better and better too. If you nail the "entertain" aspect of this technology, it's half the battle won.
Apart from filters (which are now more advanced than the "bunny ears" or "dog tongue" videos of OG Snapchat days) you can also create a world effect where a 3D character is visible in your current environment through your smartphone. For example, to promote a movie on Godzilla, the marketing team can get an AR world effect where Godzilla shows up in your room. Exciting, immersive and compelling enough to make them look up the prices of the tickets of the movie and potentially buy them too.
Sell with AR
How can AR make you sell more products, you ask? Here are the core reasons why it can benefit you.
Use it for Free Marketing - If the AR effect is good, it will get shared by Instagram's audience (that's a total of more than 2 billion active users in 2022). You have a chance to get access to a huge audience, organically! The more uniqueness and involvement the AR effect can give to the user, the better. Use it for Paid Marketing - If you'd like to take it up a notch, spend some money on ads to bring in a targeted audience that will be most likely to purchase something your brand is offering.
Use it to Be Memorable - FOMO is a strong emotion and if you immerse people into an experience virtually, you will leave them wanting more. With a more personalized experience, they are bound to remember your brand and come back to your profile later as well. Best case scenario? You end up impressing a potential customer right away and they follow you, share the AR effect with their friends and they all end up purchasing something. Win win.
Create User Generate Content with AR
One of the main things that can make your content viral is that your AR effect can help users create their own content. You can hold a giveaway or a contest wherein users can make videos by using the AR filters creatively and that's how you can get to a huge audience by way of word of mouth publicity.
With the emergence of Reels on Instagram and also Shorts on Youtube, short form content is more accessible than ever. In such a scenario, AR videos have made a much bigger impact than normal video ads. We will take a look at some examples further ahead.
