As part of our continuing effort to test, improve and update our interactive print resources and tools, we have made a significant upgrade to our calls-to-action.

Download the refreshed Layar Call-to-Action Pack, including the Layar Logo and the all new Call-to-Action Guidelines.

Our research and experience have shown that proper calls-to-action are imperative to the success of an interactive print campaign. Alerting your users through descriptive and explanatory calls-to-action is, more often than not, more important than the overall quality of the digital content. After all, if users don’t know about your content, it doesn’t matter how great it is!

Thanks to over 40,000 Creator editors publishing campaigns, popular interactive print titles reaching millions of homes monthly, over 30 million Layar App users and sophisticated analytics, we have a unique vantage point from which to observe how users are consuming interactive print.

Based on our observations, we have identified the most effective calls-to-action. Therefore, we have reviewed, user-tested and redesigned our calls-to- action to better provide you with the most efficient ways to make your campaigns more apparent to your users.

The Call-to-Action Guidelines are part of our goal to unify calls-to-action across campaigns to educate new interactive print users while providing a seamless experience.

A few weeks ago we asked for feedback in our Creator Survey. We received lots of great feedback, but what we heard the most was a need for more help with creating engaging campaigns and attracting users to them.

We heard loud and clear, so here are a few resources that will help with just that.

Presentation: Creating Effective Campaigns
We’ve created a very helpful presentation (embedded above) that provides a lot of great tips for creating an effective campaign with the Layar Creator. You can view it on Slideshare or download it as either a PDF or a Keynote file. In it you will find:

• Steps and guidelines for creating effective campaigns
• Tips and best practices
• Examples of effective campaigns
• Links to support resources, like video tutorials and step-by-step guides

New Instructions Downloads
We’ve noticed that the most successful Creator campaigns include clear instructions and calls-to-action for readers. To make this easy for you to implement, we’ve created some handy images and icons that you can use with your campaigns. The downloads available include:

• The Layar logo - Use this with some action text (like in the images above) to attract readers to your content.
• Instructions - Use this imagery (like the one shown below) to show readers how to download and use Layar with your publication. Available in Dutch and English.
• Instruction Copy - The text from the instructions imagery if you wish to use it on your own.
• Logo & Instructions Pack - Download all of the above, and more, in one easy pack!

Video Tutorials
And finally, we’ve continued to create more helpful video tutorials for quick and easy glimpses into using the Creator. So check out the videos below to learn how to use AR video in your campaigns, and a step-by-step guide to exploring and understanding campaign statistics!

How else can we help you? If you have requests, send them to devsupport@layar.com!

If you’ve followed some of our recent posts about Layar Vision projects (for instance, the LINDA. and Make Magazine promotions) then you may have come across the logo you see on the right. That’s the “View with Layar” logo. So what is it?

In essence, we encourage that developers and campaign managers place the icon on the images they are augmenting with Layar Vision content. This way, whenever you see the icon, you know there’s an extra experience to be viewed with Layar.

Augmented reality campaigns rely heavily on strong calls-to-action from products. We’ve created the “View with Layar” logo to help get users to pull out their phone and experience a new world of digital content. The logo draws the attention of the user and clearly directs them to interact with augmented reality.

We’ve recently updated the Layar Wiki (a tool mainly for developers) with additional information regarding the icon, and wanted to share some of those details with you here on the blog.

For developers using the icon, we ask that they make sure it is placed so that it is clearly visible to users and is not obstructed by anything else around it. Also, we ask that you do not alter the icon itself in any way, including changing the color or aspect ratio. For more guidelines, see the Wiki article mentioned above.

But all you need to know is that wherever you see the “View with Layar” icon, you can pull out your phone, fire up Layar and quickly view an interactive digital experience.