Dr Matthew Freeman, Reader in Multiplatform Media at Bath Spa University, has founded Immersive Promotion Design Ltd., a new marketing consultancy for the world of Extended Reality. It supports Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) businesses to better communicate with their audiences about the magic of immersive content.
The company builds on sector-development research funded by StoryFutures Academy and Bristol+Bath Creative R+D, and brings together expertise from the BBC VR Hub, Limina Immersive, StoryCentral, Raucous, Bath Spa University and beyond. Last year the team partnered with The National Gallery, Anagram and Studio McGuire to build research-led and audience-tested promotional campaigns for live VR and AR experiences. This led to the creation of new promotional strategies, prototypes, industry bibles and teaching resources for how immersive experiences can be better marketed to today’s audiences.
Talking about Immersive Promotion Design’s success so far, Matthew said: “Many people have recognised the enormous potential of immersive technologies like virtual and augmented reality to transform the creative industries as we know them. Up until now, however, the immersive sector has struggled to reach bigger, more mainstream audiences – the kinds of people used to streaming Netflix but not yet interested in VR headsets.
“The challenge is obvious: How do you communicate the magic of being in a VR experience via social media, posters and trailers? Immersive Promotion Design Ltd. provides a step towards establishing a new promotional language for VR and AR, opening the door to a bigger, more diverse immersive audience. We are very excited to see where this journey takes us.”
Visit www.immersivepromotion.com to find out more.
When you meet with prospective customers do they go away impressed ready to take the next step or are they underwhelmed because you’re the same as all your competitors?
If it’s the latter then clearly something needs fixing. In today’s market you cannot afford to be just another supplier and leave prospective customers cold.
In our opinion, the moment you meet with a potential customer is the most important part of the entire buyer’s journey; by this point you’ll have invested a huge amount of time, money and effort into developing products, marketing them and nurturing leads. The buyer will also have invested time and effort in researching suppliers to find the right fit. Those initial meetings between you and the customer are crucial and will determine whether you can secure their trust and win their business.
“Before making a detailed supplier evaluation 79% of buyers are already aware of at least three potential suppliers, and 86% already have a preference.“ B2B Marketing
When you meet with customers, you have a narrow window of opportunity to impress and in that narrow window you need to demonstrate your capabilities; the value you deliver and the opportunities you can create. You need to access any content the customer wants, instantaneously, and this all needs to be delivered through a personalised, visually compelling experience that leaves them empowered, visibly impressed and keen to move forward.
“97% of senior decision-makers said the professionalism of a potential suppliers presentation was very important or important in awarding a contract”, RSW New Business Survey
So, how do you make sure the customer walks away impressed?
The key is to give your sales team and the customer everything they need to support their conversations and create the WOW and an interactive sales tool is the backbone of this. It acts as a window into the core of your business and brings your proposition to life.
A great sales tool needs to be built around three parties:
And, it must seamlessly connect and work for all three together
1. Your Customer
Give them a personalised sales experience
This is probably the single most important element for your customer.
Firstly, they want to feel that you’re addressing their challenges and requirements specifically, and not being presented with generic information. They want to know that what you’re presenting is specifically tailored around them, their role, their needs, their business and their industry sector.
Personalisation helps with familiarity – your customers will quickly understand your proposition if it’s presented to them within a familiar format, using terminology and visuals that they understand and that resonate. This is all the more important if some of the decision-makers are not technical experts in your field.
A personalised experience is memorable – it will be much easier for your customer to remember the salient points of your proposition and be able to articulate and sell your proposition internally to other key decision-makers if you use visuals that are easy to recall. Nobody remembers a list of bullet points.
A flexible narrative
You can never second guess a customer and know exactly what they are interested in or thinking, an interactive sales tool means you don’t have to adopt a linear approach and hope that you’ve covered everything needed.
Interactivity allows you to take a different route as the conversation progresses, letting the customer steer the conversation in the direction most relevant to them. It opens areas for a conversation that perhaps previously you hadn’t thought the customer would be interested in.
Simplicity
Simplifying complex ideas and being able to articulate them clearly and simply is key to demonstrating a greater understanding of the customers’ business, challenges and where your solutions fit. It’s all too easy to think that by overcomplicating your narrative you’ll be demonstrating your deep understanding of their business.
Wrong, you don’t want to have to make your customers think hard about what it is you can do for them, that wastes time and creates risk in the customer’s mind. And equally, you want to equip them with information that they can easily relay internally to other key decision-makers within their business who you’ll need on your side to make a buying decision.
Value led not product-led
Always focus on the value you deliver for your customer. If your conversations are purely product-led it makes it harder to differentiate yourself from a competitor and you’re not addressing the underlying reasons why a customer is interested in your product or service in the first place.
Value is a key differentiator and it directly addresses the reasons why a customer came to you in the first place. It’s also important to consider that sometimes a customer doesn’t necessarily know what the true value is that they are actually after and a good sales experience should help them to understand this. This is where the conversation becomes more consultative and helps to elevate your position beyond that of just a supplier.
Make it visual, make it memorable
Images and graphics are far more memorable than just text – your brain can interpret visual information 50,000 times faster than text alone. So, it’s important that key information is visualised in a way that is familiar to the customer so they can easily recall and retell the key points of your value proposition.
You’ll also save considerable time in explaining complex ideas and processes if you can simply visualise them, giving your customer more time to ask the questions that are important to them.
A clear & logical narrative structure
This should be obvious but more often than not we find customer presentations are badly structured leading to confused messaging and a lack of a clear narrative progression.
Your conversations with customers have to follow a logical narrative progression so that you can address a customer’s issues, answer any concerns or push backs and provide them with clear answers as to why they should give you their business. This will also help them internally when they need to persuade other decision-makers within their business that you are the right choice. You’ll have armed them with a clear argument structure.
Create the WOW
Almost every company is proud of its R&D and likes to portray itself as an innovative and dynamic business. It’s not good enough to talk about it you need to live it and show it. Creating the WOW is not just about the message and demonstrating your capabilities it’s about leaving a lasting impression and that also means portraying a strong brand and using immersive visuals.
So, if you can demonstrate you understand your customer, their sector, business and unique challenges, you’ve helped them to understand where you can add value and how you can help their business in a clear simple and logical format this will go a long way towards building trust, and building trust is central to the whole sales process.
2. Your Sales Team
Clear narrative structure & sales guide
Every salesperson has a unique style and you don’t want to hamper that but at the same time you do want to ensure that nothing gets missed in conversations and that messaging is consistent across all your team.
The best way to do that is to have a clear narrative structure but one that is flexible enough for different presenter styles and which ensures that whoever uses it, important messages and arguments are not missed.
Flexibility of message
A recent study by Aberdeen.com found on average sales teams spend five working days every month searching for relevant content they need to make a sale. This is wasted time.
A well-developed sales enablement tool will be able to flex and address the needs of all of your customers no matter what job role, sector, or geography.
This is where non-linear sales tools make a difference as you’re able to personalise the conversation with different customers without having to create new sales presentations each time. You’re also able to address role specific issues within one meeting – for instance, you might have representatives from Accounts, Logistics, Operations and Technical in one meeting and you have to be able to quickly and confidently address the unique challenges and perspectives each has within the business.
Access anything, instantaneously
When a customer asks a question you have to be able to address that question then and there you don’t want to tell them you’ll have to come back to them at a later date. A digital sales enablement tool ensures that you have access to everything a customer might need whether it’s case studies, specifications, technical data, videos, PDFs etc. to cover all eventualities.
Share content instantly with your customer
As we know customers are impatient and don’t like to wait for things, if they are interested in something you need to strike. Having the ability to send them content they’ve just been looking at such as case studies, videos, technical sheets or product details as you’re discussing it is invaluable.
Not only have they got a record of everything they were interested in but a copy can also be sent to your CRM or head office so that you have this vital data too.
Online & offline
It’s not always possible to access online content when meeting customers and you don’t want to be accessing large video files during a meeting. Sales enablement tools are designed to run both online and offline, whether you have an internet connection or not you can still access all that valuable content.
Any device
You don’t want to have to tell your team or customers that they can only use an iPad or laptop to use your sales enablement tools. They should be able to access all of this great content no matter what device – iPads, smartphones, laptops, PCs – or operating systems, Windows, iOS etc. It’s all about making things easy for your team and the customer.
To sum up, a well thought out sales enablement tool with an intuitive user journey, simple (but not simplistic) visuals and a strong narrative will help to make the sales rep’s job a whole lot easier but not only that they’ll be spending a lot less time explaining what you do and how you do it so that they can focus more time on the customer’s specific needs.
Confidence is everything and if they can go into a meeting knowing they have absolutely everything they need to impress a customer that goes a long way towards creating a great first impression and building trust.
3. Your business
Data & analytics
Crucial to ongoing success and optimisation, sales enablement tools can have sophisticated tracking tools embedded which will report back on every interaction a sales rep and customer has whilst using the tool.
This isn’t about keeping tabs on what the sales team are up to but understanding exactly what the customer is interested in and what content is resonating with them. This means you can channel your efforts and budget into that content proving to be most effective
Consistency and control
An issue for Marketing is always around the consistency of message and branding. How often do your sales teams make their own presentations just before an important meeting? How can you be sure that they are on message and on brand? A well designed and constructed sales enablement tool will negate the need for them to do this as everything needed will already have been carefully built into the tool.
Single source of truth
Ensuring all your sales team have the latest documents, videos, specification sheets, case studies, whitepapers etc. can be a real challenge not to mention time-consuming.
Sales enablement tools can be connected to a central source of information, such as a CMS (Content Management System) and/or DAM (Digital Asset Management System). Any changes made in the CMS / DAM will automatically be reflected in the sales tool, both the sales and the marketing teams can be assured that only the latest, compliant information is being accessed in front of customers.
Integrations
Within your business you’ll have numerous digital platforms to support your efforts. Key amongst those will be your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System – an invaluable sales and marketing support tool. Your sales tool can connect to your CRM so that any information shared with a customer can be recorded directly back into your CRM
Knowing that your sales team has everything they need to have a productive conversation with a customer, that the customer will have access to all the information they need, and the fact that you know both parties have the latest content will give you peace of mind and confidence.
At POP we have a single-minded focus on supporting businesses at this critical phase, it’s all we do.
We work with businesses on every stage of the process from establishing what success and the perfect sales tool will look like to how it will function and support you, your sales team and customers as well as being aligned to your wider business objectives. This is backed up by our agile design and development methodology to deliver, integrate and constantly improve on your sales tool.
Our sector expertise covers Advanced Manufacturing, Medical Devices, Pharma, Construction and The Built Environment and Technology.
If you’d like to have an initial exploratory call then you can talk to me directly on the number below or just email
Develop Me, working in partnership with Babbasa, are offering fully-funded tech bursaries for four young Black people living in Bristol to learn how to code and begin their career as software developers.
Develop Me’s programmes have a market leading, 95% post course hire rate into the tech industry. The bursaries aim to remove the social and economic barriers of entry for under- represented young people by providing opportunities and access to education connected to highly paid in-demand tech careers.
With 18% of tech employees from Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds; and specifically, only 2% from a Black, African, Caribbean or Black British background – a long climb to diversity remains for the industry (The Chartered Institute for IT/BCS 2020).
Al Kennedy, Director of DevelopMe, explains, “Now – more than ever – is the time to work together across the Bristol city region – to invest in local talent and to create supported high value career pathways that are accessible to everyone to become future leaders in the tech sector.”
Comprising of four fully-funded places (valued at £9,450 each) on Develop Me’s newly launched part-time 52 week Coding Fellowship Bootcamp, every student will have access to Career Coaches, full learning support, industry mentor community to help set them up for their future careers, as well as a loan of an Apple Laptop for the full duration of the course.
This initiative is co-funded partly via Develop Me’s Opportunity Fund supported by hiring partners, matched by Develop Me, plus the generous support from their mentor and alumni community. Bristol inner-city-based youth empowerment social enterprise, Babbasa, is supporting with recruitment and access to under-represented communities.
For further information head to their webpage: https://developme.tech/black-bristol-tech-pathway/
In the two and a half years since launching, Bristol-based Haio has gone from strength to strength, making their mark as one of the fastest growing local UX and development agencies in Bristol and the surrounding area.
Now the team have taken an exciting new step, relaunching the brand – including taking on a new name; Unfold.
Making the complex simple…
Making the most complex things seem simple has always been the super-power behind the Haio team – helping growing digital businesses to create world-class user-experiences and digital platforms. The team works under the belief that with the right people and tools, anything is possible.
So what do Unfold actually do?
In short, the team build websites, web apps and digital platforms for start-up and scale-up businesses. They help entrepreneurs and business leaders develop world-class experiences by bringing expertise across four areas:
So why the change?
Working closely with fellow BCI member Sue Bush from Touchpoint Design, Haio needed a fresh platform and a clearer market positioning to continue growing alongside it’s clients scaling businesses. The team sought-out their raison d’être and in uncovering this essence, a better definition of who they are and what they do. Unfold is the culmination of this journey and sets the scene for their next exciting chapter.
So, what can you expect from Unfold?
Unfold’s mission is to empower and propel entrepreneurs and their businesses to the next level.
They’re also making their expertise from across the team more accessible, offering free, no obligation 1 hour consultancy sessions with a product or technical lead, to help talk through some of the challenges you might be facing. You can book a call any time through their website https://bit.ly/3oHJu70.
In addition to this, they’re on a mission to share their knowledge and break down barriers in understanding regarding tech development, startup success and digital platform scaling. This is why their new website has a fantastic new Resources Hub, dedicated to entirely free articles and reports on everything in the startup ecosystem – from fundraising through to scaling your technology.
Win a free UX audit for your business
Thirdly, to celebrate the launch they’re also running a small competition – offering 5 free UX audits to UK businesses. This is a chance to have a professional UX designer review and recommend some approaches to a specific challenge you may be facing with your digital product. You can find out more about that here https://bit.ly/3pFIrWx
Automation of systems plays to the strengths of using computers. They can tackle mundane or routine tasks efficiently, without complaint, and without the avoidable mistakes that can occur when humans repeatedly perform manual tasks. Embracing automation ensures your engineers and developers can focus instead of solving problems and adding value to clients.
If you’re repeating something more than two or three times and the task is tightly defined (e.g. the data fields never change), it’s time to automate, especially if the tasks are very straightforward (such as adding data to a database).
Automation is often cheaper than you think, and the efficiencies it delivers can vastly outweigh the cost. Plus if investing in automation saves someone 1-2 hours a day or week carrying out a task, that time can be reinvested in solving other problems and delivering more work.
An obvious benefit of investing in automation is its ‘always on’ nature. Programs don’t take breaks, even during public holidays.
Automating can differentiate your services, meaning you can add value by solving clients’ challenges based on your unique knowledge and experience rather than performing mundane tasks that anyone could do. Automating routine work also gives you the space and time to tackle the harder problems – if you play to the strengths of the computer you can do 80% of the work with 20% of the effort.
Automation requires detailed planning to ensure the solution integrates with existing systems and is future proofed for any future developments. This will take time from experts. Depending on your existing systems, there may also be some software to purchase and bespoke programming to complete.
If implementation is rushed and manual processes pushed through first, it could take longer to unpick things and automate at a later date. Finally, automation does not mean automatic forever – maintenance will be needed from time to time. Context changes, systems change, data changes, clocks change – all of this needs to be managed and monitored.
So, spend some time thinking about the data you’re handling. How manual is it? Are you repeatedly discovering that data is missing when someone is on annual leave and only they know how to do it? Do you find that occasionally data is missing because someone copied and pasted into the wrong column? Are you frustrated that some data is in one system but not another, meaning you can never get a full picture?
If your answer to any of these is ‘yes’, and you want to streamline your customer data workflows, get campaigns, reports and insights delivered faster, it could be time to get automating.
This article was written by Nicholas Blake-Steele, Technical Director at Armadillo, and first appeared on AI Magazine.
Public sector service design specialists chosen by NHS Bristol, North Somerset & South Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) to help support parents and carers of children with special or additional needs.
Government service design specialist, Mace & Menter, has won a competitive tender to work with the NHS on a series of projects to adapt and innovate health services in the South West.
The service design specialists will support Bristol, North Somerset & South Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group’s ongoing drive to design more effective and inclusive services around the needs of people in the region.
“We needed a partner with deep experience in service design and user research to bring to life human-centred design, and to help us understand how we can apply that in the wider health and care system. We wanted someone who could help us benchmark our skills and upskill the team,” says Ben Carlson-Davies, Insights and Engagement Manager, Bristol, North Somerset & South Gloucestershire CCG.
He adds: “Mace & Menter stood out as the strongest candidate with lots of experience in working with public sector teams. They also really took the time to understand the business needs, and actively challenged us about our own capabilities and where we want to be in the future.”
The Mace & Menter team will initially run research and digital concepting work for the CCG, and North Somerset Council to help them improve the Local Offer website for parents and carers with children with special or additional needs and disabilities.
Working in partnership with the CCG, North Somerset Council and North Somerset Parent Carers Working Together, this research will aim to better understand the current needs of parents and carers when using the Local Offer website. Alongside the research, Mace & Menter will be showing ways the service could be improved through concepts, storyboards and prototypes.
Sam Menter, Co-founder and Managing Director of Mace & Menter, says: “Our research project will ultimately feed into a business case for development and improvements to the existing services across the South West region. The first phase will help increase communication, awareness and information available to parents and carers in North Somerset.
“We have extensive experience running public sector service design projects, upskilling internal teams and embedding a people-centred mindset. Our combined experience of design for services, design and the built environment make us a great fit for the NHS and local government.”
POPcomms recently completed work on developing an entirely new interactive sales tool for Bacardi Martini to be used by the reps across the UK when meeting with customers.
The challenge
Bacardi own 62 spirit brands and is the world’s largest privately-owned spirits company.
Sales reps for Bacardi will regularly meet with a diverse customer base from bars, pubs and clubs to restaurants and hotels and within those establishments, they may be meeting with bartenders, managers and business owners, all with different requirements and understanding of Bacardi and its brands.
Meetings might involve introducing the customer to a new brand they haven’t stocked, giving advice on how to upsell premium brands through to in-venue activations, sponsorship, branding and best practices as well as the latest market research and data.
For each Bacardi brand they have a wealth of valuable content from tasting notes, heritage, brand videos and guidelines, associated cocktails, social media assets, as well as business case information.
In the short time a rep has with a customer they often struggle to have more meaningful conversations around any challenges Bacardi can help them with and introducing them to new brands, activations and market research that they can profit from.
Finding the right content at the right time depending on a customer’s needs and the conversation was very difficult.
How we helped
The result
From our workshops with Bacardi and their sales reps we mapped out a customer narrative and created an interactive sales tool that let reps personalise the conversation no matter who they were talking to.
The tool gave them access to valuable content, important to the customer, within a couple of taps.
This meant reps could quickly access what mattered to the customer such as market research, best selling cocktails, up-selling best practice, latest brand activations etc. within seconds saving precious time meaning more time for the customer.
Sales reps now have exactly what they need, precisely when they need it.
Welcome to the third and final blog in our series on Augmented Reality (AR).
In case you missed it, our first segment introduced AR technology and its impact on markets across the globe, while our second blog explored AR’s potential when it comes to marketing, today. Today’s final instalment delves deeper into the practical use-cases for AR today, along with some of the loftier examples of where its tech could take us.
If you had one, you were of course, lucky enough to be able to afford an extortionately expensive high-end smartphone. You were also probably unlucky enough to be pestered by people who wanted to ‘have a go’ for themselves.
Arthur C. Clarke said, ‘Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.’ And touchscreens certainly had enough magic to magnetise the masses. Now, AR is taking a similar step from the realm of the mystic, into reality. And the timing couldn’t be better.
From the everyday, to the extraordinary: there are opportunities for the world’s biggest brands, most digital-savvy marketers and forward-thinking businesses.
In the age of the smartphone, you could be forgiven for thinking business cards have largely become redundant. But if the line ‘Are you on LinkedIn?’ doesn’t set you on fire, an AR business card could be a stronger opener when encountering potential business contacts in the wild.
Upon scanning your business card, the recipient could be greeted by a showreel video of your products, a short introduction to your business, a tour of your office locations or even live and up-to-date special offers – in fact, there’s limitless potential.
And best of all, creating an AR business card could be a lot simpler than you think. Prototypes already exist which simply work by the recipient scanning a QR code on the card with the camera on their smartphone – no special apps or software necessary!
It goes without saying: this tech doesn’t need to be contained to your business card. Product catalogues, service leaflets and even your quarterly reports can all be brought to life with some clever AR, making your brand not only more appealing – but more engaging, too.
For those of us who treat clothes shopping like a competitive sport, aiming for a new P.B. each time we hit the rails, life could become simpler with the introduction of augmented reality.
One option, which many of us will already be aware of, is ‘virtual try on’ – both online, with the assistance of your laptop or smartphone camera, and in-store through specially-AR-activated mirrors.
L’Oreal was one of the first businesses to introduce AR ‘smart’ mirrors at beauty counters, offering consumers the option to try on cosmetics with ease – and my guess is this will only become more prevalent after the hands-OFF-your-face impact of the pandemic.
Virtual try-ons aren’t just for people, either.
If you’ve visited the Ikea website recently (who hasn’t during lockdown?) you can now ‘try on’ furniture, wallpaper, tiles and more to visualise products in your home. And the same principles can be applied to commercial premises, too.
So if you’re selling high-end office furnishings, commercial signage, or even an air conditioning unit, you can easily make your products more impactful by introducing them directly into your customers’ lives – even if it’s virtually.
This doesn’t need to be just about chasing Pokemon. You can create a treasure hunt for adults which introduces a new level of interactivity between your brand and your customers anywhere you have a physical presence.
For example, if you’re attending an expo, you can place AR locators around your exhibition stand to deliver information about your individual products and services. You’ll stand out from the other exhibitors at the event, and be able to engage your visitors more effectively, keeping them attentive for longer so your employees can follow up the conversation too. And, again, it’s a great conversation starter.
If your business has a retail presence, you can replicate this experience in your showrooms – or even choose to implement an AR window display which could be used to great effect on social media, too.
So imagine this. You hear the clunk of your letterbox and head to collect the post. There’s a small, shallow cardboard box with a bold message printed on top.
GRAB YOUR PHONE AND GET READY.
You open the box, and a leaflet drops out: SCAN ME. Opening your phone’s camera app, and capturing the QR code, you’re taken straight to a video, introducing a teaser on an Amazing New Productᵗᵐ.
Upon further inspection, the leaflet introduces you to the brand behind the ANPᵗᵐ – you even watch a video about the team and see they’re local. In fact, their interactive office location map shows they’re just a mile away, where you can pop into their showroom for even more information.
It might sound otherworldly. But at Proctors, we’re making virtual, reality today. We can help you to create an irresistible campaign, whether it’s wowing shareholders with your next quarterly report or enticing new customers with clever interactive artwork in a viral social campaign.
Talk to us, and let’s discuss your possibilities at [email protected].
Welcome back to the second blog in our three-part series on Augmented Reality (AR). In our first segment, we introduced AR technology and explored its potential impact on our lives over the coming years.
But the technology already exists. And so, this poses an opportunity today.
Any brand who considers themselves a true tech pioneer, who is looking to distinguish themselves from their industry competitors, or is ready to forge an unrivalled relationship with millennial and Gen-Z customers, should consider grasping the opportunity AR presents for marketing and customer engagement, today.
When it comes to experiential marketing, there’s no better vehicle for delivering an unforgettable brand experience than AR. As mentioned in our previous blog, the possibilities are limited only by your imagination – but there is one decision you’ll need to make early on: how you’ll deliver the experience to your viewers.
For those looking to get started today, there are two methods of AR access to choose from: by building an app, or using WebAR.
For many, apps are the option of choice. In-app augmented reality enables you to control the entire experience from end-to-end, maximising elements such as branding.
Take Pokémon Go, for example. The combination of technology, art and culture to form a real-life treasure hunt was arguably one of the most successful experiential campaigns to date.
During its peak, as many as 20% of Pokémon Go players were using the app every day, and by March 2019 it had been downloaded more than 1 billion times. Those are some vast numbers.
The ease of use was a key factor in the app’s success – and it’s worth noting, there’s no doubt that downloads would have been significantly lower had the app required specialist technology, i.e. had it required additional headwear like ‘Snapchat Spectacles’-type tech to play. But every one of us has a smartphone in our pocket at all times, leaving a near-zero barrier to taking part.
The other option for creating an AR experience is to use WebAR.
Sometimes referred to as WebXR due to its ability to support AR, VR and MXR (Mixed Reality) functionality, WebAR allows you to use an AR experience directly within your browser – without having to download an app.
Most smartphones are WebAR-enabled, making it arguably even easier to access than downloading an app. However, you may have less control over some elements of the design.
So how do you choose the right platform for your audience? At P+S, we believe it comes down to your intent.
If you’re looking to integrate an AR experience into your website, maximise the ‘wow factor’ of your marketing materials or offer an AR experience in real-world locations, WebAR is a great choice. It removes barriers and offers instant access for anyone using a compatible device – without the need for having to stop and download an app.
However, if you’re looking to run a more complex experience – a game, or a more developed user interface like map overlays – then launching an app offers an excellent self-contained, immersive experience with unlimited customisation options. And you’ll have the added benefit of being able to update and push new content without disruption to your other content and materials.
Apart from creating the next gaming sensation, how can augmented reality actually be applied for brand marketing purposes?
For those businesses promoting a product, it could be as simple as creating the ability for customers to ‘see’ a 3D visualisation of your merchandise face-to-face – all from the comfort of their own sofa. IKEA have recently begun offering just this, enabling customers to view furniture in their homes before ever making a purchase. And with COVID-19 set to disrupt the store experience the foreseeable future, now has never been a better time to offer virtual product experiences.
For those businesses who offer a service rather than a physical product, this is an opportunity to think laterally about marketing.
Let’s take an airline, for example. While enabling customers to view a Boeing 747 in their own living room isn’t necessarily offering value, they could offer an augmented ‘map’ of airline routes across the sky instead.
Or, they could look closer at the in-airport experience. In larger international airports, offering an augmented map that leads customers from the security gates to the airline’s private lounge, or straight to their flight gate, would be a breath of fresh air.
Architectural firms can use AR to show their projects to a client in real-time. Financial services can demonstrate abstract concepts in a more tangible visualised form. And what’s more, the data shows that AR visualisations improve B2B buyer confidence, and help to speed up sales cycles.
From marketing, to product visualisation, to making invisible concepts visible, the AR experience creates higher levels of engagement, increases conversions, and offers a powerful branding opportunity. When done well, it’s inherently social media friendly, shareable and creates a powerful lasting impact.
But that’s not the limit of what AR will bring to brands.
Our next blog, and final instalment of our AR series, is coming soon – stay tuned.
Why not contact us today at [email protected] to discuss your goals with our team.
Marketing automation software does what it says on the tin: it’s technology which relieves some of the pressures of marketing your business, product or service, by automating your marketing processes.
No longer just the secret weapon of larger enterprises, marketing automation makes campaigns for businesses of any size easier to manage. From email to social, websites to text messaging, automation technology works across multiple channels – and across different touchpoints in the customer journey too.
But with hundreds of tools available, where do you start?
Luckily, we have tonnes of experience with automation software at P+S. In this blog, we’ll break down why it’s worth investing in automation, how it all works, and give you five top tips to make sure it’s a success.
So, if you’re searching for a way to deliver more qualified sales leads with less supervision, nurture customers more effectivelywhile conserving your resources, and reduce your marketing spend while increasing sales opportunities, read on.
In short, automation software can do almost anything. One of the biggest benefits is that it saves you time and resources – no more having to hit ‘send’ on every action you take. Plus, automation tools give you one place to manage multiple marketing streams, collect customer data and customise your campaigns.
Some of the tasks automation software can assist with include:
With the right automation software, you can liberate your team’s time and creativity. So members are free to work on bolder ideas for attracting customers, free to aim for more ambitious targets, and free to expand your business into new growth markets.
But your team still needs to deploy, optimise and develop your marketing software strategy: team members will still need to do the thinking, while the ‘heavy lifting’ is carried out by the technology.
There are thousands of different MarTech providers out there, offering hundreds of marketing automation solutions. Choosing the right one can be a bit of a minefield.
The best place to start is by identifying your business’s most critical needs. Are you taking too long to react to customers’ buying signals? Or maybe you regularly find yourself chasing the wrong leads? Make a list of your most urgent issues – there will undoubtedly be a tool designed to solve them. Once you’ve covered the business critical, you can then increase this list to include ‘nice-to-haves’ to help you further narrow down your options.
It’s important to create tangible goals, too. Not only will these help you measure your progress after deploying your technology, they will also help you to ascertain whether the investment is worthwhile for your business – and to justify that choice to your stakeholders, too. Using SMART objectives is a strong starting point for developing goals that make the most sense for your business.
Whichever provider you decide is best for you, there are a few ways to optimise the approach further.
Whatever software solution you settle on, choose to focus on simpler automation processes first, using simple data sets. This could be pre-scheduling some of your social posts, or regular marketing emails. Once you’re sure you know exactly how well this works, and that you’re benefiting from doing so, you can begin automating more complex processes with more tailored audience segments too: personalised automated upselling for customers who’ve shown interest in certain products, for example.
Any campaign you’re managing with automation software should complement your existing marketing. This isn’t the opportunity to overhaul your tone of voice and begin bombarding people with daily newsletters. You’ll still want to focus on enriching your customers’ lives with relevant news, information and products.
Employing new software is easier when your team is receptive to the change. Who will drive its success within your business?
Identifying someone to be the internal champion of your automation software is a powerful move. Usually, this person is in a senior position, acting as an authority on the tech as well as a successful user of it. This person’s guidance and experience will also help you make decisions about training and support requirements, and put plans in place for the adoption and rollout process.
The goal here isn’t to just market as much as you can – it’s to increase the value of your brand to your customers, using automation to build a long-term relationship with them. Automation enables you to interact with them in a more meaningful and relevant way, to build brand loyalty at every point in their journey.
And, of course, this wouldn’t be a P+S blog without us mentioning measurable goals. As previously stated, setting clear, ambitious but achievable KPIs from the very beginning will allow you to measure your success. Lead scoring and nurturing data should form a part of these KPIs, and will help you to establish a business case for continued investment.
Even the strongest marketing team can benefit from automation technology. Half of the challenge of marketing today is collecting, organising and applying insights from a flood of customer data – which is easier said than done.
From website visits, to open rates, clicks, social engagement, events and forms – the amount of customer information available is truly staggering. But by analysing it all, you can identify key behaviours which can then become a trigger for marketing automation processes. It means you can immediately respond to those triggers, and exponentially improve the efficiency and value of your marketing.
At P+S we work with our clients to ensure their marketing automation software gives every customer a better, more personalised experience. We’ll save your marketing teams countless hours on repetitive tasks, and ensure your business never misses an opportunity to connect with customers across every touchpoint – no matter where they are in their user journey.
Plus, not only do we help you make more of your customer data, we also measure the results – and continually optimise them, to become even greater.