How to Create an Augmented Reality Marketing Campaign

Creating and deploying an Augmented Reality campaign sounds like a big undertaking. We’re going to take you through the steps to bringing an Augmented Reality marketing campaign to life in this article. We’ll look at all the required information and assets, and help you plan out the steps you need to take before you launch.

Augmented Reality Marketing Campaign Checklist

Firstly let’s take a look at the list of things that you’ll need to decide on and have in place, prior to any Augmented Reality marketing campaign going live:

1. Identify the goal of the campaign: Is it primarily to increase brand awareness? Attract new leads? Re-engage old customers?
2. Decide on how your audience will interact with the AR: Using printed flyers, posters, pull-up banners or other printed material?
3. Identify how you’re going to get the material in front of your target audience: Is it via Direct Mail? Hand outs at an event? In customers order packages?
4. What desired action do you want your audience to take inside the experience? Is it click through to your website or social media? Is it to take a screenshot of the experience and share to socials?
5. Create the design file for the Augmented Reality image target
6. Create the content to display within the experience
7. Announce on social media that your campaign live to spread awareness and increase interaction rate
8. Use analytics to track performance and influence future campaigns.
   

1. Identify the goal of the campaign

Having a clear campaign goal in mind is important so that you can accurately track the success of the campaign. There are dozens of potential campaign goals, the most common campaign goals that we see used are lead generation, increase brand awareness and website traffic.

Lead Generation‍

One way to run an Augmented Reality lead generation campaign could be to place a lead capture form before the experience begins, the viewer would be required to enter their details to be able to access the experience. This is the most aggressive way of generating leads, essentially putting the experience behind a lead input form.

One less aggressive way of optimising for leads would be to link to the lead generation form from a Call-to-Action within the experience. This would allow the user to view the augmented reality experience with and a choice to input their details, as optional. This could be incentivised with an offer.

Brand Awareness‍

To optimise for brand awareness would be to place no restrictions on the viewing of the augmented reality experience. Making it accessible to all, and allow the audience to engage with the brand without limits.

Website traffic‍

Link clicks to website can be optimised through a clear and concise Call-to-Action click to website. Clicks can be further incentivised through offer redemptions or time limited offers.

2. What material will you use?

Next stage is to determine how your audience will interact with your augmented reality marketing campaign. Augmented Reality is best used with print marketing, as it's a fantastic way to encourage the consumer to engage with your brand material.

Do you want to apply the experience to printed flyers, wall-mounted posters, vinyl banners or if you're going to an industry conference, place your augmented reality experience onto the pull up banners.

You can see a great example of how Jackson Hogg used their A5 size folding leaflets to present their augmented reality experience. They used their augmented reality experience to showcase their brand video with a call to action at the end to get in touch with their sales manager. This is a clear example of how we can use call to actions within the experience to drive results.

Watch the video of Jackson Hogg's experience:

There are no print size restrictions. Use AR at billboard size or as small as business card size, the choice is yours.

If you're finding hard to decide the most appropriate print material to use, reach out and our expert team are happy to assist.

3. How will you deliver the campaign?

So now that we know what the campaign goal is and what type of material the Augmented Reality experience will be displayed upon, we now need to work out how to distribute the material.

Some of the most popular ways are:

• Direct mail
• Flyer hand outs at networking or conference events
• Included in existing customer packages
• Mounted on your office wall
• Pull-up banners at events

A selection of the most creative ways we've seen clients deliver is:

• Branded beer coasters (from a brewery brand)
• Cupcake icing at corporate events
• Customers order package bags
  

The Hand Dyed Shoe Co. used their shoe boxes to host their Augmented Reality experience, thanking their customer for their purchase and giving the customer a positive message before they open their new purchase.

Once the user scans the QR code, or types in the URL into their phone browser, the experience activates and Hand Dyed Shoe Co. CEO, Simon, begins talking to his customer!

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4. What desired action should users take?

Call-to-Actions inside your Augmented Reality experience are super important in driving that all important ROI. It could be to direct users to your website to make a purchase or to send an email enquiry. You could link directly to your social media, or encourage users take a screenshot of the experience and share to socials.

You have total freedom of your desired CTA’s. So get creative and just remember to keep that campaign goal in mind when making a decision.

An example of a great CTA is this example from Boot Barn who directed users straight to their e-commerce store with an awesome discount offer for their latest range of products, Wonderwest.

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5. Design your AR image target

What's an AR image target? An AR image target is the design file which is automatically detected by the iOS or Android device camera, triggering the Augmented Reality experience to start. Once the user loads the experience URL and points the camera at the design, the Augmented Reality experience springs to life.

We’re ready to start designing. Our top tips for designing a quality AR image target are the following:

Image targets should:

• contain many distinct, sharp, high-contrast features
• contain features around the outer edges of the image
• match the aspect ratio of the augmented video content

Image targets should not:

• contain patterns or highly repetitive features
• contain large amounts of blank space
• contain solely a QR code without other graphics
  

When designing your piece of printed material for Augmented Reality, remember to keep in mind that for best performance and highest interaction rates, you should always display ‘activation instructions’ within the design. This gives the user clear instructions on how to activate the AR experience.

We typically use the following instructions in our standard designs:

"Scan using your phone camera or go to aircards.co/link to view the experience on your mobile device."

This message is clear, concise and get the user very quickly from A to B. From looking at the material, to viewing the experience in less than 3 taps.

But you have total design freedom when creating this. So feel free to get creative with the activation instructions!

6. Find the content

What content do you want to display with the experience? We’ve seen clients film dedicated content specifically for their AR campaigns and we’ve also seen brands recycle pre-existing video as a way of getting more use out of content they’ve already invested in.

Video content with fast moving visuals, colourful displays or real people presenting to camera work great with AR.

We typically compress videos to achieve 20mb or less in file size. It’s important to compress video content to optimise for speedy loading times.

7. Spread awareness

Now that we have all the assets in place, you’re ready to go live with the campaign! Now what? Shout about it!

You’ve just deployed a cutting-edge innovative Augmented Reality marketing campaign, so let people know they can experience it. Use social media to preview a video demo of the experience, email your database and use any other means to get the message out there. This is your opportunity to maximise ROI and drive those valuable actions.

8. Track, analyse & optimise

Finally, analytics tracking. Monitor, track and re-target where possible. Aircards provides a full analytics dashboard in which you can track metrics like views, CTA clicks, dwell time and more. Use this data to fine tune future experiences and increase ROI.

Make sure you have your pixel tracking setup on your website so that you can re-target any website visitors that come from your Augmented Reality marketing campaign.

Did you know that Aircards provide an end-to-end service for the creation of app-less augmented reality marketing campaigns?

Aircards take the hassle away, do all of the above for you and create amazing campaigns to really ‘wow’ your audience. You can take a look at a selection of recent client campaigns over on our YouTube channel.

If you’re interested in starting your own augmented reality marketing campaign, go to aircards.co or email michael@aircards.co to start a conversation.