- StreetFight’s article “Can Immersive Marketing Boost Local Businesses?” talks about the use of AR in local businesses.
- Author: Mike Boland
- January 14th, 2021
Excerpt From StreetFight: Can Immersive Marketing Boost Local Businesses?
Less-Obvious Evolutions
Beyond these well-known areas of SMB digital transformation, there are less obvious evolutions. Ten months into various stages of lockdown, we continue to see new and creative ways to empower local retailers and restaurant owners to engage sheltered and distanced customers.
This brings us back to AR. There are several potential ways that it can help businesses market products in more immersive ways or drive foot traffic via AR gaming. We recently examined the latter in GameStop’s partnership with Pokémon Go to drive foot traffic.
Since we wrote about that, another AR-related example caught our eye. Uptown Network launched a digital gift-giving format for restaurants, offering them a way to provide gift cards to their customers that feature AR-enabled opening experiences to infuse some interactivity.
Built with the help of Rock Paper Reality, the new program lets restaurant customers scan a code from restaurant signage or marketing materials. That lets them browse menus and choose dishes or items to gift, then send a personalized message. The recipient opens the gift through a mobile AR experience (see video below).
BYOM
Uptown’s approach has a few advantages. For one, it can be delivered digitally so that the recipient gets it right away, as opposed to the delays that accompany a physical card sent by mail. It also sidesteps the impersonal aspects of digital gift cards — such as an Amazon gift card that unceremoniously lands in your inbox.
For the restaurants themselves, AR gift cards can be a way to alleviate cash flow shortages as both virus upticks and cold weather limit their service options. Selling future meals is one way to do that. And the AR gift-opening experience differentiates it in the above ways.
To make back-end integration easier, AR gifting can sync with POS systems. This offers some flexibility for restaurants, as the choices they offer to gift-givers can align with their existing channels. That could be gift cards, food delivery, or whatever they already offer.
Speaking of integration, AR gifting happens under Uptown Networks’ “Bring Your Own Menu” (BYOM) platform for QR-code-centric digital menus. This means Uptown has a distribution network in place for AR gifting. Two million people have used BYOM.
Highlighted Quotes:
“It also sidesteps the impersonal aspects of digital gift cards — such as an Amazon gift card that unceremoniously lands in your inbox.“
“For the restaurants themselves, AR gift cards can be a way to alleviate cash flow shortages as both virus upticks and cold weather limit their service options. Selling future meals is one way to do that. And the AR gift-opening experience differentiates it in the above ways.“
Read the full article here: Can Immersive Marketing Boost Local Businesses?
