10 Marketing Goals You Can Achieve with 360 Virtual Experiences

As markets become more competitive, marketing strategies become increasingly diversified. No modern marketing professional is tasked with simply achieving a single goal. Instead, the strategy is likely built on a variety of layered objectives, all ultimately driving towards growth and success in multiple ways.

Setting goals is vital in any modern marketing department, regardless of industry. According to CoSchedule, goal-setting marketers are 376% more likely to report success. But what happens once those goals are set?

The focus turns to execution. And when it comes to that execution, it’s vital to find tactics that serve to accomplish not one, but multiple marketing goals. Enter virtual tours.

With a rich history reaching back almost 30 years, 360 virtual experiences are far more than visual gadgets. They become crucial delivery mechanisms for some of your most important promotional and educational marketing messages. More specifically, the right virtual tour software can help you achieve these 10 common marketing goals.

1) Increase Brand Awareness

A core marketing goal, increasing brand awareness is simply about making sure that your target audience knows who you are. To accomplish that goal, visuals are absolutely vital. And there might not be a better visual to accomplish it than a virtual tour.

Add virtual experiences into your communications to increase brand awareness, and you naturally work towards this goal. That’s because these experiences are by nature engaging, allowing your audience to immerse themselves into your space. They’ll get a much better idea of who you are, and what you stand for, than they would with a few words, a picture, or a simple graphic.

2) Build a Competitive Advantage

This marketing goal comes in many shapes. You might frame it as standing out from your competition, or in more absolute terms as increasing market share. It might even be the closely-related brand positioning that places you in context with your closest competitors.

Ask yourself a few questions:

How many of those competitors have a 360 virtual experience like yours?
How many of the ones that do leverage it in a way that convinces and engages your audience?
Do they use it to highlight their physical space only, or also the ways in which they’re unique?
Do they tell a story about their brand through their digital map and tour?

Chances are that you will not be able to answer yes to all of these questions for any of your competitors. That, in turn, opens the possibility to build a competitive advantage, simply by creating a virtual tour that calls out your brand positioning in a unique, visual, engaging way.

3) Improve Brand Reputation

Your brand is, above all, what your audience perceives you to be. Through strategic branding, you can seek to influence these perceptions, impacting not just competitive positioning but also overall brand reputation. The more your perceived brand lines up with your intended one, the more likely you’ll be to drive audience trust, conversions, and sales.

A virtual tour can, and should, play a core role in improving that reputation. It helps you build your brand, employer or otherwise. How that happens depends on your industry:

In higher education, a virtual tour might help you show that your urban campus still offers plenty of green space.
In hospitality, your virtual tour can show off your leisure spaces, from your pool to your conference area.
In logistics, the same type of tour can showcase the warehouse space you have available along with its efficiency planning.

Of course, these are just a few of countless examples. The right virtual experience can specifically target common perceptions and misconceptions, setting the record straight.

4) Increase Audience Engagement

This one is a natural fit. You need audience engagement because it gives you the time and space to make your pitch that your business, product, or service is the right match for your audience. Virtual tour software, meanwhile, gives you a natural playground for building that engagement.

That’s because this is an interactive medium at its core. Your audience will turn from passive viewers to active participants, choosing to experience your space at their own pace. Supplemental media, like embedded videos or narration, further enhance these feelings of immersion to build your audience engagement rates.

5) Enter a New Market

It’s an age-old marketing problem: how do you unlock a new market, with audiences not yet familiar with your brand? It might be starting to recruit out-of-state students or talent, or simply trying to get customers to understand your brand and the pillars on which it’s built.

A virtual tour, of course, is far from the only mechanism you should use to accomplish this goal. But, leveraged the right way, it can play a significant role. It’s a low-investment way for your audience to familiarize themselves with your brand and physical space. Without needing to travel, they can envision themselves on your premises. The sales pitch that follows becomes much easier as a result.

6) Optimize Lead Conversions

Generating quality leads is the top priority of most marketers today. Once you get the contact information of interested members of your target audience into your database, you can build targeted and more relevant follow-ups specifically designed to drive sales conversions and revenue.

But you need to give them something that feels worth giving up their contact information for. On the right platform, your digital tour can become one such lead magnet. Strategically embedded contact forms prompt your visitors to provide their information for more in-depth content in return, naturally integrated into their 360 virtual experience.

7) Increase Physical Visits

It might sound counterintuitive. But if your business relies on physical visits from prospective clients, students, or customers to close the deal, a virtual tour can actually help to accomplish it.

In higher education, for instance, virtual tours have actually been shown to increase physical campus visits. That’s because they offer a taste of the ‘real deal’, prompting the audience to more easily envision themselves in the space. The decision to take the physical trip becomes much easier to make and execute as a result.

8) Increase Sales and/or Revenue

It’s a natural follow-up to the above, but still worth highlighting on its own. Almost no modern marketing strategy can be called a success without a specific emphasis on driving revenue. Your virtual tour, as you might imagine at this point, can help you accomplish that marketing goal as well.

The reason is simple: once your audience has familiarized themselves with your space, which ideally tells your story, they’ll feel more closely connected to your brand. They’re a part of the community now. The decision to close the deal and become your customer becomes more natural, requiring less convincing in the process.

9) Increase Customer Loyalty

Don’t limit your virtual experiences to your prospective clients or customers. Your current clients can benefit from it just as much. If your goal is to build customer loyalty, increase student retention, or decrease churn, your virtual tour can help in a few core ways:

Provide premier access, perhaps even to spaces your current customers are not (yet) familiar with.
Learn about new facts, such as sustainability on your campus or customer benefits shown through the tour.
Build interaction possibilities, allowing customers to provide suggestions for future improvements of both the tour and the physical space itself.

And of course, it also comes back to engagement. Offering your customers a way to engage with your brand beyond just buying more products can help keep your business top of mind for them, which will pay off when the next purchasing decision comes.

10) Improve ROI

Finally, it’s important to realize that all the above benefits are possible without a major budget expenditure. In other words, the returns tend to far outpace the initial investment, a helpful fact for any marketer whose goal is to improve and optimize their marketing ROI.

Virtual tours can build engagement, awareness, brand positioning and reputation, and sales. But they do it without the six digit investment that tackling these goals individually would require. Instead, it’s a single platform, with benefits stretching in almost all possible marketing directions.

Enhance Your Marketing Strategy With 360 Virtual Experiences

Put simply, virtual tour software can and should play a major role in your marketing strategy. Build it the right way, and accomplish far more than a visual representation of your space. You build a powerful platform, designed to engage both prospective and current customers in ways that help you accomplish more than one marketing goal.

Of course, you have to find the right software to make that possible. A 360 virtual experience that doesn’t have a contact form integration, for instance, will do little to help your lead generation optimization efforts. Straightforward maps, without virtual integration, will be unlikely to build significant audience engagement.

That’s where we come in. Concept3D has built a reputation for virtual maps and tours across a wide range of industries, from hospitality and education all the way to logistics. Our platform is well-suited to integrate into your marketing strategy and execution, helping you accomplish your marketing goals in more ways than one. Contact us today to learn more.

The focus turns to execution. And when it comes to that execution, it’s vital to find tactics that serve to accomplish not one, but multiple marketing goals. Enter virtual tours.

Increase Brand Awareness

Increasing brand awareness is simply about making sure that your target audience knows who you are. To accomplish that goal, visuals are vital. And there might not be a better visual to accomplish it than a virtual tour.

Add virtual experiences into your communications to increase brand awareness, and you naturally work towards this goal. That’s because these experiences are engaging, allowing your audience to immerse themselves into your space. They’ll get a much better idea of who you are, and what you stand for than they would with a few words, a picture, or a simple graphic.

Build a Competitive Advantage

Ask yourself a few questions:

How many of those competitors have a 360 virtual experience like yours?
How many of them leverage it in a way that convinces and engages your audience?
Do they use it to highlight their physical space only, or also how they’re unique?
Do they tell a story about their brand through their digital map and tour?

Improve Brand Reputation

A virtual tour can, and should, play a core role in improving that reputation. It helps you build your brand, employer, or otherwise. How that happens depends on your industry:

In higher education, a virtual tour might help you show that your urban campus still offers plenty of green space.
For hospitality, your virtual tour can show off your leisure spaces, from your pool to your conference area.
In logistics, the same type of tour can showcase the warehouse space you have available along with its efficient planning.

Of course, these are just a few of countless examples. The right virtual experience can specifically target common perceptions and misconceptions, setting the record straight.

360 virtual experience

Increase Audience Engagement

Enter a New Market

A virtual tour, of course, is far from the only mechanism you should use to accomplish this goal. But, leveraged the right way, can play a significant role. It’s a low-investment way for your audience to familiarize themselves with your brand and physical space. Without needing to travel, they can envision themselves on your premises. The sales pitch that follows becomes much easier as a result.

Optimize Lead Conversions

Increase Physical Visits

It might sound counter-intuitive. But if your business relies on physical visits from prospective clients, students, or customers to close the deal, a virtual tour can help to accomplish it.

In higher education, for instance, virtual tours have been shown to increase physical campus visits. That’s because they offer a taste of the real deal, prompting the audience to more easily envision themselves in the space. The decision to take the physical trip becomes much easier to make and execute as a result.

Increase Sales and/or Revenue

Increase Customer Loyalty

Provide premier access, perhaps even to spaces your current customers are not (yet) familiar with.
Learn about new facts, such as sustainability on your campus or customer benefits shown through the tour.
Build interaction possibilities, allowing customers to provide suggestions for future improvements of both the tour and the physical space itself.

Improve ROI

Virtual tours can build engagement, awareness, brand positioning and reputation, and sales. But they do it without the six-digit investment that tackling these goals individually would require. Instead, it’s a single platform, with benefits stretching in almost all possible marketing directions.