With ongoing advancements in video technology, businesses are constantly looking for new and innovative methods to promote their brand, encourage interaction and foster engagement with prospective customers. One increasingly popular approach is the creation of virtual 360 tours.
A virtual 360 tour can be defined as a simulation of a specific location that, composed from a sequence of still images or videos. Users can then not only view but interact with these images and videos, enabling them to explore the virtual environment with ease. Moreover, if you choose to incorporate additional multimedia elements such as text, music, videos, animations, augmented reality, PDFs and narration, you can significantly enhance the overall user experience.
Who Can Benefit From Virtual 360 Tour?
Due to their highly immersive nature, virtual 360 tours can help to spark interest from stakeholders and encourage maximum engagement. This versatile technology can be utilised by businesses across a variety of industries, including real estate, hospitality, events, and tourism.
Now that we have established what virtual tours are and why they are useful, we will explore more specific benefits. Moreover, we will explain 8 different reasons why your business should consider creating an immersive virtual experience.
1. Immersive & Interactive User Experience
One of the key advantages of virtual 360 tours is their ability to offer an incredibly engaging experience. Unlike traditional 2D video content, these tours require users to actively navigate and interact with the virtual space. Because of the high level of user engagement, virtual tours are a powerful tool for promoting your brand, products, and services, all while delivering a memorable and immersive experience.
Additionally, using an augmented reality headset can elevate the experience even further, allowing users to fully immerse themselves in the virtual environment from their own unique perspective.
To demonstrate how immersive and interactive 360 tours can be, we have created a virtual tour of the Eon Visual Media office below.
2. A Closer Look!
Another key benefit of virtual 360 tours is that they provide stakeholders with an opportunity to explore products, services, and locations in great detail.
By capturing high-quality images and videos, virtual tours allow users to experience a product or location from a first-person perspective. An example of this can be seen in the video below, where we partnered with TransPennine Express to showcase their brand-new train carriages.
3. Access All Areas!
Once these tours are produced, your location and services can be accessed and viewed by users 24 hours a day, 7 days a week!
Furthermore, they enable allow businesses to showcase areas which would are off-limits to the public, or difficult to access for those with mobility issues. For example, a heritage site may want to produce a virtual 360 tour which would allow users the opportunity to access and view a fragile exhibit that would ordinarily be off-limits or inaccessible to the public.
In a post-pandemic world, many businesses may want to produce a virtual tour that allows users to view and access content from the safety of their own homes.
An example of this can be seen below, where we produced a virtual 360 tour for Nottingham Forest football club, allowing fans to have an all-access experience following the team out onto the pitch on match-day.
4. An Informative Experience
As well as providing users with a view and tour of a specific location, virtual 360 tours can also incorporate additional multimedia elements such as text, music, videos, animations, augmented reality, PDFs and narration. By incorporating additional visual elements, this can help to enhance the overall user experience.
For example, museums can use virtual 360 tours to allow users to view their exhibits whilst also incorporating supporting text and visual media to educate the users further and enhance the overall experience. A great example of this can be seen here, where users can take a virtual tour inside Westminster Abbey and view historical facts about the location.
5. Innovative Marketing Content
Virtual 360 tours have the ability to serve as a powerful marketing tool for promoting your brand, products, and services. By offering a dynamic, immersive experience, virtual tours allow potential customers to explore your offerings in a more interactive way than traditional static content. This type of content goes beyond simply showcasing products or services; it invites users to interact with the space and learn more at their own pace, making it a highly engaging experience.
Whether it’s guiding potential clients through a showroom, giving a detailed tour of a property, or highlighting key features of a product, virtual tours can drive deeper connections and understanding with stakeholders. This level of interactivity also boosts user engagement, making it more likely that viewers will remember and share the experience.
Additionally, incorporating virtual tours into a marketing strategy can help position brands as contemporary and forward-thinking. By utilising cutting-edge visual technology, businesses can demonstrate their commitment to innovation and customer experience, which can help set them apart from competitors.
6. Greater Customer Reach
As most virtual 360 tours are published online, this can allow businesses to expose their products, services and premises to a global and online audience. For example, a tourist attraction may want to produce a tour which helps to promote their destination and attractions and potentially inspire new tourists to visit their destination.
A great example of this can be seen in this video, where viewers can explore the Magic Kingdom theme park at Disney World Orlando.
7. Save Time & Money!
Virtual 360 tours are an efficient alternative to hosting a tour in person. For many years, the only feasible way for a business to provide a tour of a location was to have a member of staff host and navigate a group around their premises and provide a detailed explanation of the surroundings. Producing a virtual tour will allow visitors unlimited access to your location without hiring a specific tour guide. And with virtual narration being a reusable asset, there is no ongoing cost for 24/7 audio guides.
8. Safety First!
A big concern for all businesses is ensuring the safety and wellbeing of on-site visitors. With this, many businesses cannot provide on-site tours due to concerns of visitors having up-close access to large machinery and risking the contamination of products. By creating a virtual 360 tour, a business can produce an interactive experience that allows users to explore and access these areas with no risk of health and safety and contamination.
For example, check out our virtual 360 tours below, which we produced for March Foods allowing users to get up close to the food manufacturing process.
Summary
As you can see, there are many different features, applications and benefits to using virtual 360 tours for your business.
At Eon Visual Media, we are incredibly passionate about creating visually stunning and engaging content which can help your business stand out from the competition. If you’d like to find out more about how we can help your business, please get in touch! Alternatively, you can call 01482 484850 or drop us an email at hello@eon-media.com for a free consultation!
