As we step into the metaverse, a new realm of marketing unfolds, brimming with innovation and experimentation. This digital frontier offers a unique platform for brands to engage, interact, and captivate audiences like never before. Let's delve into this exciting evolution of marketing.
What is the metaverse?
The metaverse encompasses immersive environments, often (but not always) using virtual- or augmented-reality technology, spanning the virtual and physical worlds, as well as multiple platforms.
- Powered by a fully functioning virtual economy, often built on cryptocurrency and digital goods and assets, including nonfungible tokens (NFTs).
- Allows people to have virtual identities, presence, and “agency” including peer-to-peer interactions, transactions, user-generated content, and world-building.
Rewriting the rules of marketing for the metaverse
Define your metaverse marketing goals
- Identify the platforms that provide the best opportunity and brand fit
- Design experiences appealing to target audiences
- Experiment with money-making models
- Direct-to-avatar sales of virtual goods are already a $54 billion market
- Companies need to determine the ideal balance between native advertising, immersive experiences (including games, virtual stores, events, and sponsorships), and real-world activations
- Create a community of creators who will lead and develop the communities
Tread carefully but firmly
The current technological limits and modest level of mainstream adoption are not likely to be major obstacles for experimenting, learning, and finding success with marketing in the metaverse.
- A few questions will shape its longer-term evolution: interoperability, or the ability to transfer digital avatars and assets across multiple worlds, how will the social contract and legal framework evolve, and how will user safety be ensured
- Sensitivities around marketing to minors have always existed, but as generational shifts occur, they come into sharper focus
- How will first-party consumer data be stored, managed, and protected? How will data privacy laws apply to metaverse in the future?
