From pulling a rabbit out of a hat to making playing cards disappear, magicians are masterful at illusions. When it comes to presenting complex, highly technical products online, not so much. There’s no trick to it. Showcasing your advanced products online to potential customers is a huge challenge for marketers. On the other hand, CX experts at NESTRO®, one of the world’s largest suppliers of innovative ventilation technology, magically proved how to make its products tangible and understandable for their audiences — with 3D virtualization on the Internet.
And just like that, website visitors were shown 3D views of the NESTRO® products. Prospects who wanted a deeper dive, could delve into the inner workings of their machines. While inside, the company captured contact data, valuable for the sales team. To execute, a two-stage system was devised and implemented. Each machine was 3D visualized into two different levels of detail. Their best-selling products were equipped online with annotations, available in six languages.
Voila! The company demonstrated that anyone could improve their CX online — no matter how complex your product is — with 3D visualization. Tied with a combination of Augmented Reality (AR) or even Virtual Reality (VR), you can do more than present your products, but turn them into interactive experiences. That’s good news because Gartner found with the availability of quality information through digital channels potential buyers are independently gathering information and giving less time and access for sales team to influence customer decisions.
You need to harness the power of the Internet to quickly share the benefits of your products with potential customers. By getting to the heart of your product online, you can simplify complex information. Visual presentations make a much stronger impression than the written word since the visual perception process goes far beyond a person’s intake of information. Most communication (93%) is nonverbal, according to psychologist Albert Mehrabian. The 3M Corporation found that we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.
Now, introduce interactive or immersive elements and the numbers increase tenfold. With AR you can turn your product into an explorable 3D object which can be overlayed in the physical world. Your customers can move the product around, scale it to fit into a room, and adjust for their environment. Additionally, by combining a wide variety of visual media formats you can present information in an interactive or even playful way — and tell a story.
Storytelling is not new to the advertising or marketing sectors. From the advent of the personal computer to the smartphone, companies have excelled at using emotional connections in product and corporate communications. Even the most complex technical knowledge, data and facts are tangible. Systemized approaches such as Christopher Booker‘s “Seven Basic Plots” summates that every story ever told will be based on seven basic plots.
While marketing-oriented storytelling has hinged on these story templates, merely resorting to these plot types doesn’t guarantee success. “The medium is the message,” said Marshall McLuhan. The medium through which you choose to communicate holds as much, if not more, value than the message itself.
When marketing a product or service online, creativity and a clear strategy of whom to address, where, how and what are just as necessary. You can tell stories in a variety of ways — textually, verbally, auditorily or visually. To be truly engaging, clever visualization strategies in combination with targeted storytelling are your paths to customer success.
