5 reasons manufacturers need digital twin-based, interactive marketing

Digital transformation, Industry 4.0, the Internet of Things, real-time 3D – the manufacturing sector is undergoing a sea change. Driven by innovation, the impact of interactive technologies is visible not just on the factory floor, but also in the way customers search for products and make their purchasing decisions. Here are five reasons why interactive digital twin technologies are essential to marketing success in the manufacturing sector.

“In marketing, being one step ahead of the competition is invaluable,” says Benjamin Brostian, CEO of iXtenda. He notes that using digital twin real-time 3D technologies “gives your buyers the added value of visual authenticity and a personal experience before and while they are purchasing your product.”

Empower your customers to take part in the creation process by delivering immersive personalization experiences. Customers feel emotional investment when they spend time testing and building a product to their own specifications. By involving them from the start, you increase their affiliation to your brand and products.

In the world of complex industrial machinery, business-to-business (B2B) buyers have challenges visualizing the product they require. Conventionally, product options are only available as 2D images or plans. Using interactive 3D configurators, customers can now picture and plan for their new machinery product, even before manufacturing has begun.

Take a look at the Live.HOMAG virtual showroom created by HOMAG, one of the world’s leading woodworking machinery manufacturers. They built a virtual world where buyers can view more than 35 machines, try different configurations, watch educational videos, access webinars, see machine-specific training information, and go directly to product web pages.

B2B buyers looking to upgrade or expand their machinery expect the same convenience they get when shopping for their next sofa. If your customers are already shopping online, you should be there too. That’s where digital twin-driven interactive 3D marketing experiences shine.

Using real-time 3D technologies, you can set up your omnichannel product configurator and deploy it to your platform of choice, including mobile, desktop, WebGL, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR). Wherever your customers find you online, they can try out different combinations of machine accessories, component layouts, branding elements, and more.

Created by Unity, TIMI is an end-to-end interactive product configuration demo of a GX7 skid loader. This configurator runs on multiple platforms and devices including mobile, desktop, and WebGL.

Your brand identity is a precious commodity. Ensuring your product is represented with quality and integrity is critical to protecting your brand and reinforcing your online presence. One way to make sure the digital twin representation of your product is accurate is to build it based on the product’s design data.

Unity Industry and data preparation tools like Pixyz make it easier to import the product data you already have, as well as variants, to create configurator assets and experiences. This means you can create an accurate digital twin of your product for marketing purposes, and also easily ensure design model changes are carried through to your online configurator.

The key to business success is data that gives you insight into how your prospects and customers are behaving. By offering personalized marketing experiences, you also create the opportunity to collect information about the preferences your customers express during product interactions.

Presenting options via a product configurator and aligning the configurator data to sales conversion, enables you to gain insights into consumer behavior. With this information in hand, you can adapt your marketing campaigns accordingly – making sure you’re serving the content your customers need to make the right buying decisions.

By integrating marketing content production directly into your design workflows, you can create marketing materials sooner and launch your product more quickly.

With real-time 3D sales and marketing solutions, marketing teams can create up-to-date product-accurate visual assets from the same model your design team is using to manufacture the product – eliminating the need for physical prototypes to be shipped to a photoshoot location.

Find out how one consumer electronics company integrated their design and marketing workflows using real-time 3D digital twin technologies, and got their products to market 2.5 months earlier than using traditional processes.

No longer exclusively the domain of automotive manufacturers and luxury retail brands, digital twins can be used to deliver marketing results for manufacturing companies too. This immersive technology enables manufacturers to use existing product data to create digital assets like 3D product configurators, create marketing content more efficiently, drive faster time to market, and increase consumer engagement.

Discover how you can use real-time 3D to transform your B2B marketing strategy with Unity Industry. Contact us to learn more.