If you have some knowledge in sales or marketing, the following information will probably not come as a surprise to you: Product packaging is not just an inconsequential step in the whole of the value chain, but in fact forms the backbone of a brand's identity.
First impressions are paramount to developing trust and loyalty. In this context, packaging definitely has the power to tip the scales, making the difference between a lost customer and a loyal ambassador of your product.
Companies of all sizes have since come to realize how greatly brand building contributes to their sales results, which led to marketing budgets as a percentage of overall budgets rise to 12% by the end of 2021. However, the current global economic downturn requires businesses to become smarter and more price-conscious in their marketing decisions.
One powerful and cost-effective way of strengthening your brand messaging is through AR packaging, which refers to the transforming of traditional packaging into digitally enhanced experiences.
Here is a succinct overview of how AR-enriched packaging will make your customers fall in love with your brand and products even more, helping you significantly grow your customer base.
In today’s world, it’s easier than ever to be overwhelmed by the constant influx of news and information pervading our everyday lives. People have had to find ways of filtering out the dispensable noise to discriminate between what’s important and what’s not.
Let’s be honest! Who enjoys reading lengthy descriptions and long winded explanations of a product and all its features? We want to access information as quickly and easily as possible and have learned to seek nothing less than immediacy.
With AR, this immediacy is possible. By adding QR codes to the packaging, manufacturers can, for example, imbed videos or digital 2D/3D images that give customers a feeling for what the product will look like once unpacked. It might also be useful to customers to get more detailed information about the product itself before purchase, including instructions on how to operate it.
The all-in-one WebAR creation platform SQUARS lets you do all of this with one tool: create the augmented content, imbed it in a QR code, and share it with as many people as you like.
Customers are not likely to buy a product they don’t know much about. People don’t necessarily go for the best products, but the ones they can identify with and feel emotionally connected to. Adding AR experiences to the packaging can help achieve exactly that.
At the end of last year, 3 in 4 global executives said they will invest strongly in such experiences in 2022, aiming to increase customer connection and product personalization.
It’s human nature to gravitate towards innovation and new trends. Providing access, for example, to a digital product trial before purchase gets your brand noticed and adds value to your products by maximizing the experience of your customers.
AR packaging doesn’t just stop at customer attraction, but also has the potential to be a fully automated process that leads to stronger relationships with your customers, thereby increasing social brand engagement and sales volume.
AR-enriched packaging is a form of customer inclusion that goes way beyond reaching out to a selected few to elicit an emotional response. In fact, AR experiences provide double the engagement levels compared to their non-AR counterparts.
Especially younger generations have been increasingly gravitating to the virtual world, making them twice as likely as the 45+year-olds to respond positively to digital experiences. This makes AR packaging a future-proof investment that will lead to increased purchase volumes on a large scale and throughout various industries, thereby maximizing your business potential.
Here’s what it could look like: Create interactive and immersive AR experiences and invite customers to immediately participate in the experience by scanning a QR Code printed on your product’s packaging. The digital content you prepared may show a nicely designed image, provide additional information about the product, tell a story, or even include interactive buttons.
Of course, there is also always room for fun. Gamified digital AR scenes where customers can control a jolly character or even their own avatar by tapping their phones with their fingers add an extra element of entertainment you can use to draw in customers even more effectively.
Gone are the days when companies had to go to great lengths to reprint all of their packaging content and laboriously attach it to every single product whenever they wanted to make a slight tweak to it. With the use of AR, this process has become easy like never before.
With SQUARS, you can make changes to the content online, directly in your editor. All you need to do to update your campaign is make a one-time change to the digital content and you’re all set. This way, you won’t only significantly reduce your spending on product packaging adjustments, but also contribute to global sustainability efforts by decreasing emissions and waste volumes.
AR packaging lets you directly track the performance of your marketing strategy. By forwarding your customers to a specific URL, you automatically have access to a range of web analytics tools (e.g. Google analytics) that give you valuable insights into a slew of interesting parameters such as unique page visits, dwell time, conversion rates, etc.. You can then use these insights to improve, and maximize the impact of, your marketing strategy.
Today’s companies have acknowledged the importance of marketing in the revenue-generating process and started to invest heavily in innovative marketing campaigns, leading to the highest rates in marketing spending growth in over a decade.
In this regard, AR packaging with imbedded AR experiences is a perfect means to build a sustainable commitment to your brand from your customers. With imbedded AR experiences, you can share information with your customers in a fun way, generate more business leads, build a deeper connection between your product and your customers, facilitate packaging updates, and also make the performance of your offline marketing strategy measurable.
SQUARS provides you with the tools and the support you need to create your own AR content for your connected packaging efforts. Get in contact with SQUARS today to get your own AR marketing campaign on track and set your business up for success. Of course, you can also sign up to to the platform for free to get a feel for the product.