Immersive Experiences in Digital Marketing

Using Augmented Reality (AR) for enhanced awareness, engagement and sales

It’s a tough crowd out there

For an online product or service, particularly if they are just starting out, making those initial connections with potential customers can be one of the most challenging things for their marketing teams to achieve.

These challenges are familiar ones to any business looking to grow their brand. Market research and identifying your target audience can go a long way towards generating plenty of helpful data for your business. But how do you apply this data? How about engaging your audience to smile at your Tweet or Facebook Post? Or even more importantly, convincing the audience to click on the link provided? These are tall hurdles that any and every company faces; and even more daunting for a small startup.

No surprise, given that there is just so much going on within individual social media channels. Every Tweet is vying for the attention of limited users for mere seconds before being buried by the next. Each Facebook post is trying to attract eyes before the next trending hashtag takes over.

Decisions, decisions

The thing is, people can be numbed by the sheer amount of choice being shoved into their faces, really. For all the hype and buzz surrounding a product or service on the internet, it can be progressively difficult to tell similar products or services apart, especially once competitors enter the fray. Which is better? Which is suited to me? Would I like this better over that?

To be fair, social media has allowed for a great deal of ways that try to answer those questions when posed by people online. You’ve got people sharing their experience on the fly, with pictures, audio and even livestreams now telling you, which is better, which is suited to you. Influencers (those personalities who command tens of thousands of loyal followers who hang onto every thing they do) need only speak and their words become gospel.

But then, the next questions start to surface. How can I trust testimonials to be true? What if I have a different experience?

Emotions, emotions

The psychology of e-commerce suggests that the human brain has three parts responsible for decision making, using instinct, emotion and rational thought to arrive at a decision. Selling something to someone online needs to involve all three parts to secure the sale, but ensuring they are in harmony, while ensuring the part of the brain responsible for rational thought doesn’t shut down the deal.

Online, selling and engagement on posts or downloads works with emotions in very much the same way. For us, we spent a lot of time mapping out and analyzing the stages of the consumer decision journey. We believe that speaking to our communities and potential users, reaching out to the heart of what makes them tick, has guided and defined the way we built OVR.

Immersive storytelling: an identifiable experience

Digital marketing is now beginning to recognize the potential for Augmented Reality (AR) to transform the way brands can engage with customers on social media. By linking together the physical world with the digital, and the growing consumer affinity for AR, it is already possible to advertise on experiences or create branded experiences.

Research also shows that customers are more willing to respond to such content and even appreciate it, as it makes them feel more valued and more satisfied. The 2017 Freeman Global Brand Experience Study says that “increasingly, they’re (audiences) valuing experiences over consumption”. The same study, however, also shows that few digital marketers have yet to tap into truly immersive experience. For example, only 22% of 1,000 surveyed globally use interactive touch screen technology, while less than 8% use any kind of extended reality tool to augment live experiences, even though AR is recognized to have the ability to “take audiences on an intensely personal experience”.

Vibrant Media research also finds that 67% of media planners and buyers want to incorporate more AR/VR ads into their campaigns, with the ultimate aim of enhancing user experience. Accompanying high demand for AR/VR advertising, the same study discovered that 49% of media agency executives believe this new approach to marketing could prevent ad blocking.

We’re already seeing a myriad of companies recording great success with AR advertising. In 2018, L’Oreal’s YouCam Makeup app saw 3.5 million downloads only a year after its initial release. The IKEA Place app, which allows virtual placement of around 3,200 IKEA products into homes, is another successful AR app. There are numerous others that prove AR advertising has just begun to gain momentum.

The OVR World-Scale Decentralized AR Platform

This potential for personal immersive experiences is precisely one of the cutting-edge aspects of the OVR AR platform. OVR implements a decentralized advertising system based on a publisher-advertiser principle where the OVROwners of OVRLands can insert sponsored or branded content from advertisers into the AR experience, enabling any visitor to access this OVRExperience when visiting the OVRLand. Rent and Earnings are all settled via OVR tokens within a verifiable and safe blockchain environment.

If the idea of creating these personalized AR content sounds expensive, it needn’t be. The marketplace is also a place for AR designers called OVRCreators to build their own experiences, or be hired to create for companies and brands. And because everything is priced democratically, designers, owners and advertisers are free to set their own rates and agree to a service, letting the free market determine the value of these experiences.

Perhaps more interestingly, this will result in an OVR community that will create and share experiences with each other, further motivated by a concept of being first buyers of strategic locations that can potentially have many visitors, hence large volumes of access to experiences.

With AR ads expected to generate over USD 13 billion in revenue by 2022, OVR is an early mover. And with Business Insider expecting mobile AR users to grow 100% YoY in 2018 to surpass 1 billion users this year, you can expect consumers to actively seek out mobile AR experiences. This speaks a lot about the monetizing potential for OVR’s first users who will be part of that wave of early adopters in prime position to own strategic locations.

About OVR

OVR is a cutting edge AR platform powered by the Ethereum Blockchain. OVR makes it possible for users provided with a mobile device or a smart glass to live interactive augmented reality experiences customized in the real world. OVR can be defined as a new standard in augmented reality where geographical experiences are based on user’s position.

Website: https://www.ovr.ai/#intro

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