What are the best virtual and augmented reality strategies for building customer relationships?

1 Define your goals and audience

Before you dive into VR and AR, it's important to have a clear vision of what you want to achieve and who you want to reach. Depending on your goals and audience, VR and AR can be used for various purposes, such as educating customers about your products or services, entertaining them with memorable experiences, empowering them to customize your offerings, enhancing customer service or support, and engaging them in social or environmental causes. Additionally, it's important to consider your audience's preferences, needs, and challenges. What kind of VR and AR experiences do they enjoy? What kind of devices do they use? How can you make them feel valued and appreciated? Answering these questions will help you create a successful VR/AR strategy.

2 Choose the right platform and format

When defining your goals and audience, it's important to choose the right platform and format for your VR and AR strategy. You could use mobile apps that use smartphone cameras or sensors to create AR effects, web-based platforms that use browsers or webcams to deliver VR or AR content, headsets or glasses that provide immersive VR or AR experiences, projection systems or holograms that create 3D images in physical spaces, or mixed reality devices that combine VR and AR elements. The platform and format should match your objectives, budget, and technical capabilities. Additionally, you should consider the accessibility, usability, and compatibility of your platform and format. How easy is it for customers to access, use, and share your VR and AR content? Does it integrate well with existing channels and platforms?

3 Create compelling and relevant content

Creating compelling and relevant content for your VR and AR strategy is essential to capture your customers' attention, interest, and emotion. This content should provide value, information, or entertainment. To achieve this, you can use storytelling techniques to craft narratives that resonate with your customers, add gamification elements to add interactivity, challenge, and reward to your content, personalize the content to their preferences, behaviors, or locations, integrate social media to enable them to share, comment, or collaborate on your content, and use feedback mechanisms to collect their opinions, suggestions, or testimonials.

4 Measure and optimize your results

Finally, you need to measure and optimize your results from your VR and AR strategy. Tracking and analyzing relevant data and metrics is essential to gauge progress towards your goals. This could include the number of downloads, views, or shares of your VR and AR content, as well as the engagement rate, retention rate, or conversion rate of your content. Additionally, measuring satisfaction level, loyalty level, or advocacy level of your content can help you understand how well it is performing. Furthermore, you should calculate the return on investment, cost per acquisition, or customer lifetime value of your VR and AR content. Utilizing the insights and feedback from this data can help you improve your VR and AR strategy - testing, experimenting, and iterating on your content, platform, and format can optimize performance and outcomes.