Is Your Business Implementing VR?

The Virtual Reality market has been steadily growing and is expected to grow to an industry of $US 2.16 trillion by 2035 and plenty of organisations are taking advantage of the boom, for instance, Facebook bought Oculus for this very reason. There are also endless opportunities in this sector and the organisations that move quickly would have the advantage. Computer simulation has become an important part of the gaming industry and Telsyte estimated that by 2020 2.5 million households would own a VR unit. But its uses are far advanced to be just utilised in gaming.

Virtual Reality has and can be used for education and training as well. And it is slowly taking over the business world as well. With a plethora of benefits associated with implementing the technology in your business, make sure you don’t miss out on any one of them. How do you do that? By asking yourself if your business is implementing VR. Since Virtual Reality is one of the top trends in 2017, your business is going to benefit once you implement this technology. Whichever business enterprise you run, Virtual Reality can help you take it to the next level. And it’s not even that expensive!

To help make up your mind, here are some of the ways in which implementing VR will aid your business.

Employee Training for Design Related Businesses

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Capturing and dispersing knowledge has become easier with Virtual Reality. The immersive way of distributing knowledge makes sure that all your employees remain up-to-date with the technicalities involved.

In the real estate industry, most businesses were early to catch up on the trend. They started with 360-degree virtual walkthroughs and made marketing properties easier. Even the construction industry has now caught up to the trend. Whenever a client demands some changes in the design, they can easily see the final look through VR. See KFC’s employee training below!

VR as a Marketing Tool

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This immersive media also makes for a great marketing tool. Since most families are still new to the Virtual Reality experience, it’ll be the perfect tool for attracting them to your business. Such activities provide businesses with an opportunity to raise brand awareness and customer engagement.

Businesses like McDonalds, Samsung and Lowe’s have realised the efficacy of using VR as a marketing tool and they are making the best of this opportunity. See Jack Daniel’s marketing VR.

Adding a Twist to Print Media

Traditional print media has seen some setbacks since the internet has taken the market by storm. Although there are many people who still prefer the old way of reading the newspaper, there can be no denying that the new dimension of news and entertainment has gained immense popularity. Virtual Reality has also penetrated this industry.

The New York Times caught on to it early and in November 2015, produced a VR film, The Displaced. The film was distributed to over a million Sunday home delivery subscribers, along with Google Cardboard glasses. They repeated this in May 2016. Through their efforts, they were able to make the genre feature a fresh perspective and to gain interest of the youngsters as well.

Help Customers Make Informed Decisions

Gone are the days when customers had to choose home improvement pieces without any idea of their compatibility with their home and space. Lowe’s store had been working on this problem and through Lowe’s Innovation Lab, they have developed some creative augmented, mixed and virtual reality tools.Now their customers can easily use the VR tools for designing, visualising DIY skills training and even navigation of Lowe’s store. By implementing these technologies, they have made sure that customers can easily visualise what their home improvement projects are going to look like, even before they get started. With this power in hand, customers are now more informed and can thus take better decisions.

Gaining popularity wasn’t difficult for this technology, as people are more open to new experiences as they were before. Over time, the price of technology has also dropped and it keeps on dropping, which will make it easier for Virtual Reality products to gain access to households and businesses.

So far, the production of Virtual Reality gear hasn’t achieved a sustainable level yet, which raises a question about the industry as well. Although China has already invested billions of dollars for VR hardware, in Australia, the production hasn’t seen any significant rise.

Over the years, prices for Virtual Reality solutions are expected to become even lower. This can amount to great opportunities for small businesses, which are not ready to invest yet. There are no doubts to the first mover advantage in Virtual Reality technology, but there are plenty of organisations who have put the idea on hold till the full arrival of VR. With a digital formation strategy though, businesses can demonstrate product attributes, help consumers make better choices, and can also raise brand awareness.

Convert Demand Generation into Customers – 5 Tips for Busy Marketers

If you’re looking for tips to convert your demand generation campaigns into paying customers, you came to the right place. All businesses must use different marketing and demand generation strategies to help build leads online, but generating leads should not be the only goal. If you’re unable to convert your leads into customers, then you are losing out and will not be able to complete sales. The business therefore, relies on marketers to come up with effective demand generation strategies that provide them with high quality leads. The leads a business acquires are only valuable if they turn into sales for the brand. That is why it is imperative that the business pays importance to the marketing aspect, and gets the sales process properly done. This will help them accomplish greater sales after generating valuable leads.

Here are the top 5 Demand Lead Generation Tips

1. Use Data to Understand Customers

It is important that you take advantage of data to understand the entire process of converting online leads and getting customers for your brand. This is why so many businesses spend on customer management, customer channel and data collection tools, because it allows them to easily funnel all the customers from multiple campaigns and convert leads into sales. By having accurate data available you can easily focus your attention on reaching out to people with the highest chances of becoming long-term customers of the business.

Related:
Top Successful Lead Generation Strategies

This is where most marketing and sales campaigns fail, because they don’t give the data great importance to separating customer channels and fail to assess how it will help them out. Don’t fall into the same trap, and make channel management and data a crucial part of all sales meetings, so that everyone understands and can interpret what is converting, where the customers are coming from and how long it is taking to onboard them.

2. Act Fast to Convert Leads

Once you have attracted the customers to your campaign, you need to move fast, because the longer you wait, the greater the chances that you will lose out – managing the customer response times. Faster response times will generate more demand to your campaign. There is no point in delaying a good lead, because if you don’t reach out to them in time, someone else from your industry will. That is why it is important that any decision you take must be fast, so that you can easily convert leads.

Reaching out to leads quickly also convinces customers that they are working with a business that is reliable and serious about working with them. This builds customer relationships and greatly increases the chances of the leads converting into sales.

3. Make Sure to Follow-up

Identify and open up multiple channels for leads to come back and reach out. Also find out where they are talking to manage the conversations effectively. When you’re reaching out to a new lead, and don’t get a good response, you shouldn’t give up on them. This is critical if you want to learn advanced demand generation strategies. Here’s a 3 step formula for writing brilliant email marketing subject lines that gets you through the door. 

Make sure that you reach out to them again, by sending them an email or calling them some other time so that you get the chance to talk with them. This will help increase your chances of communicating with as many high-quality leads as possible and help you convert the maximum number of customers for your business. Demand generation relies on being able to reach out to customers on what ever platform the customer is familiar with. 

4. Convert Leads by Qualifying Them

Another great demand generation strategy is by qualifying your leads separately, and setting them apart in different categories. This will allow you to have a detailed breakdown of leads from different communication channels that you can work with and the ones that you need to let go. Mark them as high quality leads and leads that you can move past, because this is how you will advance.

This helps you save time and ensure that you only work on sales-quality leads and have the right conversations with the right customers. It drastically improves your demand generation chances, and ensures that you can build strong customer relationships. Qualifying leads is a strong tactic, and one that will allow you to properly funnel leads to convert them into sales. There is also a reduced risk of losing out on valuable clients, because you already have the information needed to convert them into sales.

5. Have a Proper Sales Team

There will be no point in adopting any demand generation strategy if you don’t have a structured sales team. You need to ensure that your sales team not only manages relationships with existing clients, but is also able to convert new leads. This will help make things easier for you, because you will now be able to balance out the requirements and target customers effectively.

You should divide your sales teams so that one is focused on dealing with existing clients, while the other team handles the conversion of new leads. Having this kind of structure in your sales team will ensure that you don’t lose out on customers, and bring in new business as well. This can be achieved through a multi-channel conversation framework. 

Conclusion

If you plan your work properly, and structure your sales team, while using data carefully, then you will be able to greatly improve your chances of converting online leads from multiple channels. Remember that you need to stay in touch on various social, sms, phone, emails and chat platforms with your customers, and follow up with the right conversations, resulting in a successful sales funnel.