Immersive Content: Your Key to Increasing User Engagement

Nowadays customers are more inclined toward brands providing them with meaningful and visually appealing content that caters to their needs.

And this is where immersive content comes into the picture.

Brands, in this era of cutthroat competition, are leveraging technologies like virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and 360-degree videos to connect with new-age customers and ace out their competitors. By creating content using these technologies, you can create immersive experiences for your customers and present your product and service in a unique way.

In this blog post, you’ll learn about the immersive content experience, its types, and why marketers should use it to amplify user engagement.

What is Immersive Content Experience?

An immersive content experience is a tactic to create content using various technologies like VR, AR, mixed reality, and AI.

Immersive content experience blurs the boundaries between the human, digital, virtual, and physical realms to facilitate smarter and more interactive user experiences.

Delivering a delightful and immersive customer experience is important no matter what your business is. In fact, 90% of marketers agree that content with a visually engaging experience performs better than content that doesn’t^[i].

The Different Types of Immersive Content Experiences

An immersive content experience focuses on interactivity and immersion with the content rather than passive reading with a static PDF. Common immersive content experience types include:

• Virtual Reality (VR): A computer-generated environment that makes users feel immersed in real surroundings.
• Augmented Reality (AR): AR is the use of real-time information in the form of text, graphics, audio, and virtual enhancements integrated with real-world objects.
• 360-Degree Content: It involves the integration of two or more videos in a dome-like space that’s been shot from all possible angles with 2D instructional content overlaid on them.
• Digital Twin: A digital twin is an exact representation of a real-life component, structure, or process, which is built with robust machine learning & automation techniques.
• 3D Images and Video: This immersive content provides a perception of depth similar to a real-world object.
• Extended Reality: It is an extension of reality built by adding digital counterparts in videos, inscriptions, or animations.
• Mixed Reality (MR): It binds AR and VR into an enhanced version of AR and develops virtual characters for the real world.

Why Should Marketers Use Immersive Experiences in Content Marketing?

Marketers should curate the best stories to convince prospects and stir curiosity about their product or service. Storytelling is the cornerstone of content marketing. And combining it with immersive experiences can amplify it. Here are the reasons why marketers should include immersive content experiences in their content marketing strategy:

• Turn Products Demos Into an Immersive Experience

Immersive techniques, such as 360-degree videos, AR, VR, and mixed reality (MR) can give your customers a sense of presence.

For instance, Cisco’s world trade show. It worked with a 3D interactive sales and marketing company to create an immersive product catalog. It gave users a sense of what products look like and permits users to virtually “walk around” and engage with their products. Pretty cool, isn’t it?

• Develop an Emotional Connection and Enhance Engagement

Instead of passive reading with a static PDF, an immersive content experience demonstrates immersion and interaction with the content, thus, improving user engagement. How, you ask? Adding interactive polls and quizzes or even a dynamic element to your website can take your user engagement a notch up.

For instance, SAP, a multinational software company, adds immersive content to their Partner Solution Progression page to make it interactive. This dynamic design invites potential and current customers to click and learn more while delivering key messages.

According to a survey, immersive experiences help customers make better decisions. Over 1000 marketing and design professionals agree that they are 200% more likely to use data visualization and 300% more likely to develop interactive publications.^[ii]

• Digitize Your Try-Before-You-Buy Approach

Immersive content helps to convince customers that they are going to invest in a product they have tried. Thanks to AR, people can try things out from anywhere through phones or laptops.

This approach helps brands to shift gears by putting the “customer” at the center of the business process. It also allows businesses to improve customer information retention by aligning their creative instincts with product slideshows.

For instance, in the e-commerce sector, brands manufacture their products with built-in QR codes. When a user scans this code, virtual popups explain all the required steps to successfully install and use the products in a home setting, all from the shopping floor. Now, that’s pretty neat! Isn’t it?

• Communicate With Customers Through Visual Storytelling

65% of people are visual learners and 90% of the information reaching the brain is visual. And infographics can boost website traffic by 12% and develop a relationship with your customers. These visual data representations help communicate content in an engaging way^[iii].

For instance, IBM’s Industry City also relies on experiential content to interact with users. The following immersive infographic from IBM Industry City entices customers to explore a variety of industrial landscapes and their solutions.

The Bottom Line

Whether it’s data visualizations, interactive calculators, or AR/VR, make sure the content marketing strategy you curate maps to your user journey. A content-rich, immersive experience that supports and amplifies the customer experience will help generate leads, foster meaningful relationships with customers, and boost your ROI.

Ready to Create Content that Customers Would Love to Interact With? Let’s Talk!

Statistics References:

^[i] Ceros
^[ii] Tendocom.com
^[iii] Marketlinkaec.com