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By Brendan Scully, CEO of ScullyCreative Labs, Brooklyn, New York
It’s clear that augmented reality will soon be a very useful tool for marketers. Brands will now be able to track precisely how many of their customers actually engage with an ad. More importantly, marketers will be able to design ads in conjunction with AR developers that encourage user participation.
That said, it’s still important for those working in the augmented reality industry to define exactly what kind of ROI a marketer could expect to gain from AR advertising. Companies may understand that augmented reality offers them the chance to design new and exciting types of ads, but they still need to measure their success in some capacity. Here’s how ROI in AR can be measured by marketers.
More Effective Engagement Measures
One of the most common marketing strategies is also one of the oldest: Distributing branded content to as many venues as possible and hoping that potential customers notice.
Many augmented reality marketing campaigns are likely to follow the same strategy. However, in the past, marketers couldn’t be sure whether or not an ad actually had any impact on a customer. Now, they’ll know every single time a customer engages with a branded ad. This helps them develop more effective strategies in the future.
Perhaps more importantly, because augmented reality typically involves some degree of interaction between a person and a component of the virtual world, these types of ads will lead to greater overall engagement. When customers are focused on a particular branded experience, they’re directly focused on that particular brand, instead of a competitor. Having a customer’s full attention gives marketers the opportunity to share more valuable information about a product or service than they could with another type of marketing material.
Improvements in Testing
With all this new data, marketers are in a much better position to A/B test different content to find out which is most effective. The more data a company can gather, the more likely they are to create advertising that actually works.
There are some additional testing strategies you can rely on to make sure your AR marketing campaign delivers the kind of ROI you’re hoping for.
First and foremost, strong content is always the most important element of any strategy. Use AR as a tool to offer customers genuinely entertaining or valuable experiences that can enhance your other content. Make sure that each piece of marketing media has some type of call-to-action, too.
You should also be as specific as possible when outlining your goals for a particular marketing campaign. Again, AR gives you the opportunity to measure your progress with a high degree of accuracy. Use this to your advantage by honing in more precisely on your goals.
Augmented reality will certainly be a useful tool for marketers, but some will be able to harness it more effectively than others. The most successful brands will understand the kind of ROI this technology can provide, tailoring their campaigns accordingly. AR developers will play an essential role in this capacity by helping their clients get a better sense of what this technology can do for their brands and their bottom line.
About The Author
Brendan Scully began his career as an undergraduate research assistant at Dartmouth’s Tiltfactor Labs, focusing on the potential for humanistic design in Augmented Reality. Now he is an Augmented Reality Producer and currently CEO of ScullyCreative Labs LLC based in Brooklyn, New York where he oversees a portfolio of internal and client-sponsored product development initiatives.
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