How To Create Effective AR Marketing Campaigns - Part 1

Since 2011, Blippar has created thousands of augmented reality (AR) campaigns. This has given us a great deal of insight into what makes an AR campaign work and what doesn’t.

The key areas for a successful AR campaign can be split into two buckets:

Distribution -- making sure people can access your AR experience in the first place; and Experience -- creating effective, high impact AR content.

Distribution

AR is inherently a pull marketing medium. Users must voluntarily scan an object to bring it to life – it can’t be pushed to someone in the same way as a standard banner or pre-roll ad. Therefore, don’t overlook the importance of distribution to make sure your intended audience discovers your AR campaign.

1. Touchpoints
A ‘touchpoint’ is just the physical thing you scan to unlock an AR experience. It could be anything from a drinks bottle to a gig ticket.

Through image recognition and AR, a brand’s product can now become its main media channel. Forget TV and out-of-home, Pepsi can show you branded, digital content directly off its cans and bottles. AR gives brands the opportunity to deliver relevant, personalised content in the moments that matter, when consumers care most about brands, at shelf and when using the product.

Where possible, use a touchpoint with a longer lifespan, as these generate more AR interactions. Working with a leading cereal brand, we found that its cereal boxes generated 8x more interactions than its cereal bars.

Often the most overlooked part of a campaign’s design is the physical distribution of its touchpoints. Magazines with twice the circulation will reach twice as many people and therefore generate twice as many AR interactions. Pretty simple really. Make all types and sizes of your touchpoint interactive to increase the reach of your campaign and maximise ROI.

2. Call To Action
A Call To Action (CTA) alerts people to the presence of your AR experience. It clearly communicates to the audience that there is interactive content waiting for them, why it’s there and how to access it.

A clear and prominent CTA is crucial to your campaign’s success; without one your campaign will not be discovered and will fail. Our A/B testing shows that campaigns with CTAs perform up to 180x better than those without.

Use these three factors as a checklist to make your CTA design as effective as possible:

1. Noticeability Does your CTA stand out? Have you optimised the use of size, colour, positioning and imagery, so that it’s as easy as possible for people to notice?

2. Incentive Does your CTA clearly explain the benefit of the AR experience to the user?

3. How to interact Does your CTA clearly explain to the user how to access the AR experience

Like what you’ve seen so far? Click here to reveal the remaining three best practices for an effective AR campaign.

Contact us to find out how augmented reality can bring your campaigns to life.

Sam Whitehead is an Insights Manager in the Experience Strategy Team at Blippar.