In the wake of the current downturn, the world is headed toward times of economic uncertainty. With global recession looming and buying power dwindling, businesses that have grown accustomed to the success of recent years are now moving into poorly chartered waters, trying to reduce expenses wherever possible. In this regard, AR marketing can be a cost-effective alternative to pricey traditional marketing approaches, and may well be the way out of the cost trap many companies are beginning to find themselves in.
The global goods and services market is in disarray these days, as inflation together with rising interest rates are taking their toll on the purchasing power of consumers. As a consequence, the amount of money in circulation is dwindling.
Understandably, businesses need to adapt their spending strategy to this new reality, which usually involves imposing severe budget cuts.
For better or worse, marketing will always be one of the first cost centers that decision-makers will turn their attention to when looking for ways to cut expenses - and here’s why:
All things considered, marketing and advertising budgets are often the first to be slashed to reduce company spending, even if it means accepting the negative consequences this has on customer retention and brand awareness.
But what if we tell you there’s a way to effectively reduce the cost of marketing and advertisement campaigns, while at the same time not having to cut back on the scale, number, or quality of the projects?
AR marketing may well be the decisive factor in bringing your business safely through this difficult economic situation. Undoubtedly, the easiest way to build your own AR marketing campaign is by using WebAR.
Our WebAR platform SQUARS, for instance, lets you overlay any image, shape, or form with digital content that consumers can easily access on their mobile devices, anywhere and anytime. This opens up new exciting ways for businesses to market their products or services and, most importantly, will not end up burning a hole in your pocket.
Here is an overview of why AR marketing can help you steer your business safely through times of economic crisis:
Let’s have a closer look at each of them:
Marketing in general is expensive, which comes as no surprise, given that it is the key contributor to any business’s revenue generation. However, that doesn’t mean that money should be spent thoughtlessly, especially in times of financial turmoil and with many companies fighting for survival.
Depending on your objectives and marketing strategy, costs can quickly get out of hand. Some traditional advertising strategies which also turn out to be the most expensive ones include running ads on TV and for print, executing large-scale promotional tours, or running ads on Google or Facebook.
In contrast, AR marketing has the power to increase your brand’s engagement by raising customer interaction rates with your products and getting visitors to stick around longer on your website. At the same time, the comparatively low production costs of AR content allow you to keep your expenses within budget.
With SQUARS, for instance, you get fair and fully customizable pricing options that you can adjust according to your individual needs as your campaign goes on.
This way, you not only have a complete overview of the funds you’ve invested so far, but also the ability to monitor the success of your campaign and to flexibly adjust your strategy at any given time.
If your personnel resources are limited, WebAR marketing is the perfect choice for you. All it really takes to execute a great advertising campaign is access to the Internet. WebAR being fully browser-based, neither you nor your customers will need to download any native app to create or view the immersive experience.
In this respect, SQUARS Studio is an intuitive WebAR creation tool built with the aim in mind of ensuring that all users can easily find their way around the platform and take AR content creation into their own hands.
Here’re some tried and tested ideas of how you can use AR for your individual marketing campaigns:
This point comes with a disclaimer, though: You should be mindful about which WebAR software you choose for your campaign, as not all of them are suitable for collaboration.
SQUARS WebAR platform, on the other hand, is a perfect fit specifically for coworking environments, and can positively contribute to already established work processes.
Our Studio lets you build up and manage your own project-based teams, who can share their workload and profit from each others’ ideas while creating the content.
If you’re a marketing agency or choose to work with one, SQUARS’ collaboration feature gives you around-the-clock access to your AR content, enabling you to keep an overview of the progress and provide feedback along the way to everyone involved in the process.
When using WebAR for your campaign, you can test its quality even before launch. SQUARS’ preview function allows you to see what the augmented content will look like for your customers, and test whether everything works just as smoothly as you envisioned it.
Even once your marketing campaign is in full swing, you may still adapt the AR content at any time and for little money, which brings us to the next point:
WebAR lets you directly track the performance of your marketing strategy. By forwarding your customers to a specific URL once they start their immersive experience, you automatically have access to a range of web analytics tools that give you valuable insights into a slew of interesting parameters such as unique page visits, dwell time, conversion rates, etc..
Should you see, as a result, that your campaign needs improvement, you can instantly make changes to the content in a centralized way, and completely independent from your location. The fact that the whole AR experience is 100% browser-based makes campaign optimization efforts cheap and efficient.
If you want to use AR to market your services or products, or if you work for an agency and would like to partner up with us, please get in touch with SQUARS so we can individually discuss your goals further and explore potential partnerships.
Of course, you can also always sign up for free and try out SQUARS in the meantime.
We look forward to hearing from you!