6 Reasons Why Augmented Reality Should Be Part of Your Holiday Marketing Strategy

With brands focused on “social commerce” this holiday season, augmented reality holds the key to standing out in a world dominated by online influencers and user-generated content. Allison Ferenci, CEO, Camera IQ, explains the top reasons to invest in AR now.

Last Updated: October 26, 2021

With brands focused on “social commerce” this holiday season, augmented reality holds the key to standing out in a world dominated by online influencers and user-generated content. Allison Ferenci, CEO, Camera IQ, explains the top reasons to invest in AR now.

As brands prep for this year’s holiday shopping season, the one term on everyone’s lips is “social commerce”, and for a good reason. This has been the year that Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and other platforms made it easier than ever for consumers to purchase products they see advertised on their newsfeeds. According to some measuresOpens a new window , social commerce sales were expected to grow more than 34% this year to $36.09 billion in the U.S. alone.

With that kind of growth, brands are clamoring to find new ways of driving engagement and sales through social media. But simply running ad campaigns on social platforms is table stakes. To stand out in a world dominated by influencers and user-generated content, brands must go beyond the tried-and-true and provide consumers with the shoppable, shareable, and snackable content they crave.

See More: 3 Ways Ecommerce Marketers Can Prepare for an IDFA-Less Holiday Season

That’s where augmented reality (AR) comes in.

Marketers have toyed with AR for years, blending the physical and digital worlds to create fun, interactive experiences. If the technology was previously seen as a bit of a novelty, 2021 was the year it leaped into the mainstream. Whether they’re creating AR effects on social media, visualizing products in AR to make better purchasing decisions, or using AR to enhance their look on Zoom callsOpens a new window , consumers have embraced AR with full-throttled enthusiasm. eMarketer reportsOpens a new window that more than 93 million use AR at least once per month in 2021.

As the holiday season approaches, there’s no better time to add AR to your brand’s marketing mix. Not only will the campaigns themselves help meet a number of business objectives, but the data that you gather will propel you into a successful AR strategy for 2022. If you haven’t done so already, here are six reasons why you should incorporate AR into your holiday marketing mix.

1. Strengthen Social Connections

While COVID-19 variants may keep some people from going to as many in-person gatherings, as usual, we all still crave social interaction and human connection. The camera is the most interactive and conversational medium for celebrating and connecting with friends, family and their broader communities. A report from HootsuiteOpens a new window found that “staying in touch with friends and family” ranked as consumers’ top reason for using social media. When consumers can’t visit loved ones in person this holiday season, what better way to stay in touch than by sharing holiday-themed AR content. Who knows, an AR experience with reindeer horns on your head or jingle bells around your neck might just replace physical greeting cards this year!

2. Aid in Product Discoverability

Social media platforms are generally noisy, crowded places. Between all the videos, photos, and celebrity news, it can be hard for brands to garner much attention for their products and services. But AR is unique and compelling, not to mention the most accurate way to visualize a product virtually. It catches the eye and gets people to stop scrolling through their feed. Approximately 60% of consumers use social media to search for giftOpens a new window ideasOpens a new window , but you can’t give them gift ideas if you don’t first grab their attention. Holiday-themed AR content is a novelty that will break through the clutter.

3. Increase Engagement With Your Brand

There’s only so much interaction a consumer can have with most branded content on social media. They can share, like, or comment on your photos and videos, and rich media ads allow them to play mini-games inside the ad. But AR content takes engagement to the next level by immersing consumers’ digital representations directly into the content and creating truly interactive and personalized brand experiences. It also enables brands to have conversations with consumers by inviting them to co-create content with them. Our research shows that AR has the ability to increase audience engagement by 32x over traditional forms of branded content.

4. Encourage Virality

Your static display or video ad isn’t likely to get many shares on social media because consumers have no incentive to promote your message, nor much interest in doing so. But when consumers become the star of your ad by using their camera to co-create content that expresses some part of their personality, they are exponentially more likely to want to share it with their network. When Nestlé launched the new “Zebra” flavor of its iconic KitKat candy bar, the brand marketers encouraged Instagram influencers to post personalized AR experiencesOpens a new window on the platform. The viral effect of those influencers played a huge role in getting the new flavor to fly off the shelves. The average play rate of AR experiences created on our platforms is 57%. How does that compare to your non-AR content?!

5. Enable Virtual Try-ons

With social commerce set to explode, consumers increasingly view social media as not just a way to keep in touch with friends and family but as a storefront as well. And when it comes to clothes and accessories, what do consumers do before buying anything? They try them on, of course. AR enables consumers to try on clothing and accessories such as hats, sunglasses, jewelry and more in a virtual setting to give a very realistic sense of how it will look on them in real life. This was exactly the tactic beauty brand Smashbox Cosmetics took when it launched its limited-edition Mother’s Day lip kitOpens a new window , featuring four new lipstick color options. Moms on Instagram could use their smartphone’s camera to see how they’d look in the new colors and decide which one they liked best. The virtual try-on even applies to furniture, decorations, and any other item that consumers want to visualize in the real world. Virtual try-ons are so effective that Shopify, a leading omnichannel commerce platform, reported a 200% boostOpens a new window in conversions when AR is used for product visualization while at the same time reducing returns by as much as 25%.

6. Broaden Your Brand’s Inclusivity

Today’s era of social upheaval has caused many brands to be more inclusive of all genders, skin colors, sexual preferences, religions and more. Facebook conducted a studyOpens a new window earlier this year in which it found the vast majority of consumers (71%) expect brands to be inclusive in their online advertising. And yet, it also found that more than half of consumers (54%) don’t feel fully represented in online ads. With AR advertisements, inclusivity is baked into the experience by enabling consumers to take part directly, like how MAC Cosmetics used AROpens a new window to promote its “Pride Looks” line of makeup to celebrate LGBT Pride Month. By seeing ads that feature themselves, their friends, or family members directly in the creative instead of a model who may or may not resemble them, consumers are more likely to establish brand affinity and forge deeper relationships with your company or its products.

See More: 3 Principles To Make the Customer Experience More Human, At Scale

This holiday season figures to be unlike any other. While the pandemic dramatically altered shopping habits and advertising strategies for the 2020 holidays, this is the year that we begin to see what the new normal looks like.

This is the new age of social media, one in which social platforms have taken an incalculable leap into the age of self-expression, social connections, digital communities, and even shopping and commerce. It is also one in which the camera is, in many ways, the center of it all.

The key for brands is to go beyond ordinary advertising and traditional content. As the above reasons indicate, AR experiences represent an excellent opportunity to affect the entire branding and decision-making funnel, from awareness and discovery to engagement, conversion, and loyalty.

Instead of repeating the term “social commerce” at your next holiday advertising brainstorm, try using “AR commerce” instead.

Are you using AR as part of your holiday marketing strategy? If yes, how? Let us know on FacebookOpens a new window TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedIn.Opens a new window

Allison Ferenci
Allison has been creating new realities since she started her dual MFA in Interior Design and Digital Interactive Art at Pratt Institute. Exploring the intersection between design, architecture and human interaction, Allison became interested in how technology could bridge our online and offline worlds.
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