In 2020, more than 45 million people attended Travis Scott’s Fortnite tour. This was way before Facebook’s rebranding to Meta. Now, businesses across the globe are hopping onto the metaverse bandwagon. The virtual worlds are steadily changing the dynamics of promotions as brands are already using metaverse marketing techniques to reach their target audience.
From Coca-Cola to Gucci and Balenciaga, the list of brands operating in the metaverse goes on. There are now endless virtual worlds where you can purchase, own, and sell land, and that’s just one of the many applications. The possibilities are simply endless. All this is testament to the fact that the metaverse is the future.
Metaverse is still a relatively new field that has gripped the entire world by fascination. While some are still exploring it and what it has in stores, several others have already started to capitalize on it. Citi predicts the valuation of Metaverse and Web3 at a massive $13 trillion. A major chunk of this amount shall be attributed to marketing strategies.
After all, this new world brings you the best of innovation, technology and personalization. Thus, metaverse presents itself as the ideal platform to delve into next-gen marketing strategies that serve the new-age customers.
To understand this unique concept better, let’s begin from the very beginning.
Table of Contents
What is the Metaverse?
Metaverse is a virtual universe. It is dominated by life-like graphics which allows users to experience this virtual world in an immersive manner. They can interact and socialize in this space bridging the gap between the physical and virtual.
Mark Zuckerberg calls this phenomenon “the successor to the mobile internet”. Let us try and understand the hype around the parent term before moving on to marketing strategy.
The Metaverse Buzz
Metaverse is still a long way from mainstream adoption. But it comes with a range of exciting features that makes it so valuable. There are several noteworthy metaverse projects that have attracted some heavy investments in the recent time. This new space is in sync with the changing consumer preference towards remote, convenience, personalization, and immersiveness. Metaverse offers tactical advantage to brands as it brings opportunity for:
- Hyperpersonalization
- Real-time relevance
- Expanded sensory experience
- Community building
- Unique storytelling
- Deep customer data
The above mentioned points have immense potential to upscale a brand’s presence among the new genre of consumers. The opportunity for direct revenue generation sans the intermediaries is enormous here. The early birds, of course, stand at an even lucrative position here.
Metaverse it at infancy at the moment. However, brands must catch up to reshaping its approach to it for a smoother transition into Web3. A perfect example of this would be how businesses in the late 90s and early 2000s believed that social media presence is just a fad. There are some compelling factors why businesses should use marketing to secure their future.
Metaverse: The Future of Digital Marketing
All of us have heard the common phrase, “The future is now”. But have you wondered why everyone is so obsessed with the future?
Well, anyone who has insights about the future and is the first one to act on them is usually the one who can also lead the game. Metaverse brings us the future of retailing, servicing, communication and consumption. It has become an important factor to ensure relevance.
Here are few key points why every business should take marketing in the metaverse seriously:
1. Catch Up to The Evolving Marketing Scenario
The market is evolving at an unprecedented rate. Patterns of communication and consumption are also shifting rapidly. The new-age consumer is tired of the traditional approaches. Offering immersive experiences that are parallel to the physical world marketing can help brands loop in more users.
The metaverse marketing strategy offer plenty of room for experimentation. Brands do not need to follow any definite path and can play around with their marketing and communication plans. The goal should be to engage the audience and not to displease those who are already there.
2. Create A Dominating Presence to Stay Ahead in The Competition
Every marketer knows how crucial it is to stay ahead of the competitors to gain better visibility and brand space. To enjoy such a lead, it is vital to know the audience and what they desire. We know metaverse is multiplying its user volume by significant numbers every day. Some are seeing a long-term association, while others are still finding out more about the platform.
In both cases, the number is too large to be ignored. Also, you get to onboard your clientele before anyone else. Become the OG of your niche in the metaverse and consolidate your presence before it’s too late.
3. An Exciting Approach to Target Millennials and GenZ
According to Snapchat’s Matt McGowan, it is essential to realize the immense value that GenZ or the millennials hold. The snapchat generation, as they are popularly called, has a global sending power of more than 4.4 trillion. They also yield considerable influence over household purchases.
Metaverse is the perfect platform to reach out to this demography to market. According to surveys, 88% of Gen Z have played video games that bring them into a virtual world. It has also been found that 32% of this section have bought virtual goods and followed a virtual person on social media channels.
4. Understand The Target Audience and Predict Future Demands
In the metaverse, users can interact in their own unique ways. They are free to dive deeper and engage with products and services by looking through them and gain an inside-out experience. As the sensory engagement in the Metaverse creates valuable emotional data, brands will be able to gather vital insights of their behavior. These insights can aid metaverse marketing strategies by identifying the future demands of the group
Hyper personalization in the metaverse is another excellent way to gather real-time insights that can offer bespoke services. These insights and the response to the tailored results combined can effectively help in curating future launches.
5. Cater To An Omnipresent Approach
Omnipresent marketing or cross-channel marketing is another vital requirement today. It aims to offer an integrated experience across different digital channels. It helps the brand to catch the attention of the target audience no matter the platform. So, you cannot possibly miss out on Metaverse if you’re going for cross-channel marketing.
As already stated above, Metaverse houses a powerful purchasing community. With the cross-channel approach in your marketing strategies, you will be able to push your leads through the sales funnel with ease. This will help the brand with improved conversions without much stress.
Top Metaverse Marketing Strategies To Stand Out
Now with all those benefits of marketing, you must be wondering how to do marketing in metaverse. Well, do not worry, we are here to help you with some powerful metaverse strategies that will make this an easy ride for you.
1. Authentic, Engaging and Immersive Brand Positioning
The greatest advantage of metaverse is that it allows users to experience the virtual world like never before. In fact, it brings the intersection of the physical and the many virtual worlds. Brands can leverage this to position themselves in an authentic way with immersive storytelling. They can create engaging situations that will offer the users to engage with the product and create a powerful, retainable experience.
An poignant example of this is Nikeland, a virtual playspace created by Nike on Roblox. Here users can play different minigames and include real-life physical movements like long jumps, etc. Don’t be surprised if tomorrow Nike offers exclusive sneak peeks of products in Nikeland and asks users to co-design products with them.
2. Create Micro-Content
One of the superb marketing strategies, creating micro-content in the form of high-quality bite-sized videos can help create a desirable image around them. Reels, TikTok videos, short lists can help the viewer land up on the main page. Micro content like memes and GIFs also helps keep the buzz alive.
3. Live Video Selling
Live video selling is nothing but a brilliant combination of online selling and live video streaming. Brands can go for live video selling which can instantly add value to the brand and offer greater convenience to the users.
Such hybrid selling strategies can also employ AI that will process real-time data. This data can further aid in the process by predicting the appropriate action to push the lead through the sales funnel.
4. Personalized Offering
NFTs, collectibles, etc. can become functional tools of personalized marketing in the metaverse. Look-alike avatars, rare collectibles, buying virtual assist as an extension of one’s personality offers a unique position to brands to market themselves to the metaverse users. They can also cater to user emotions using AI and provide greater relevance and ultra-convenience.
5. Collaboration, Co-creation and Community building
Metaverse is essentially decentralized. User consensus, native tokens, interoperability are some of the important keywords here. Thus, it gives the perfect opportunity to brands to harness the power of the digital community to provide an end-to-end experience to their customers. Content co-creation can boost brand awareness and reputation while catering to both the organization and their clients.
6. Real Estate Locations in Metaverse
Investing in real estate is perhaps one of the most talked about marketing techniques. Owning your own space in the virtual world allows you to create unique experiences for the users.
Brands like Gucci, Nike, Louis Vuitton have already taken the route and are organizing fashion shows to virtual games in the metaverse. Possessing land in the metaverse gives brands the power to bring out a curated presence on the platform. Users can visit, engage and enjoy never-before moments with the brand.
7. Creating Tokenized Marketable Content
Instead of paying for clicks and ads you should focus on tokenizing your community. Tokenization is essentially the process of building a creator-consumer relationship with the help of crypto tokens. For example, you can create NFTs in your metaverse space and offer them either as giveaways, bounties, or sell them to your target audience.
However, the key aspect here is that your NFTs should reflect your project in a meaningful way while also providing some value to your target audience. In this manner, you can not only attract a huge amount of your target audience, but also create a tokenized community based on trust and credibility.
8. Virtual Events in the Metaverse
Back in 2019, Marshmello held a concert in Fortnite and over 10 million people attended it. This shows us the potential of holding events in the virtual worlds. Conducting keynotes, AMAs, interviews, debates, discussions, etc. in the metaverse will help you spread awareness and boost your project’s visibility at the same time.
Add an influencer or a popular figure to the picture and your reach will increase tenfold. Overall, virtual events are a great way to attract as many people towards your project as possible.
9. Awarding Loyal Users with NFTs/Crypto
There are always those in crypto communities who contribute towards the industry as well as the projects they are loyal towards. So, conducting bounty, exclusive, and holder airdrops for loyal users is a great way to solidify trust in your community. For example, you can offer game items, gift cards, and much more to your loyal users that they can use in the metaverse.
10. Community Building
As mentioned above, tokenization, virtual events, and rewards will boost your project’s presence. However, those practices will also help attract more users to your project. It is, therefore, essential to have the best techniques in place to better cater the needs of your community.
Since all the aforementioned strategies will help you build a strong community, maintaining it in the metaverse should be among your top priorities. This is simply because your community members will essentially be the ones who will help spread the good word about your project.
11. Metaverse SEO
It is unclear how SEO will evolve in the metaverse. Chances are high that Google will adopt an immersive approach when it comes to search engine results. Since the SEO tech is ever changing, nothing is certain as of now.
However, embracing the emerging technologies rapidly and adopting three dimensional narratives can make you a world builder as pointed out by Cathy Hackl. Overall, the idea is to use immersive technologies to provide content in the most engaging ways. This will allow you fulfill user or search intent while conveying your brand’s message.
Metaverse Influencer Marketing Techniques to Follow
Metaverse Influencer marketing campaigns can get you up to 35% more click-through rates. The average metaverse influencer marketing campaign increases click-through rates by 16% and sales by 4%, a much higher ROI than the average 1% click-through rate and 0.5% sales that other types of campaigns have.
So, let’s take a look at some of the techniques that help you create a successful influencer campaign for your metaverse project.
1. Choosing the Right Metaverse Platform
The Metaverse is an exciting, new virtual reality where you can immerse yourself in a new world. It can be a very confusing place too. You need to choose the most innovative and profitable metaverse platform to join. How can you know which one to choose?
There are hundreds of metaverse platforms to choose from. But, not all of them are good enough to succeed. You should consider joining one of the metaverse platforms with an enhanced user experience.
This could be difficult! However, with the help of a reliable metaverse marketing agency like Blockwiz, you will get the best platform to join. In addition, campaign control and management is something to be learned from every metaverse group.
All VR platforms out there have some unique features. If you’re excited to explore the Metaverse, you must test out all the platforms out there to know what works for you, or kindly reach out to a marketing agency to save you the stress of searching.
Joining a metaverse community is not enough. If you don’t want to hire an influencer for your project , you must be ready for the work. After joining a community, there is a key thing you must do.
2. Build Relationships
Thanks to immersive technologies like virtual reality, new worlds of possibility have opened up for social interaction. In the real world, you are limited to being in one place at once, but in the Metaverse, you can be everywhere. Strategic marketing is sure to establish your campaign with your target avatars.
Avatars represent people who will buy whatever you are about to market. Without a proper relationship, Avatars might not trust you because tons of influencers are scammers! Metaverse Influential marketing begins at the trust.
The aim is to increase the supply chain and establish long-term sustainability. Hence, the avatars are the exact target market for every campaign. Relationships are important in this game.
3. Showcase Better Virtual Goods
Many users buy and sell services to their digital avatars through marketing. They do this by selling digital goods to each other in a similar manner that we exchange goods in the real world. Many virtual goods are available on the market, and they are all a big success.
These are games like World of Warcraft, Second Life, and Runescape. These virtual goods have managed to become such a big success because they can be sold for a high price, and it’s hard to get your hands on them.
An influencer should always try to promote products or projects that will benefit his/her followers. Once a follower meets disappointment, such a person will not be encouraged to hop on a further campaign by the influencer. It is always imperative to verify the product you are marketing before you display it to the avatars. One of the most effective ways to catch the avatars’ interest is explained below.
4. Convert Virtual Goods into NFTs
Fungible tokens or NFTs are unique digital assets that can’t be compared to other assets. For example, you can own a unique virtual baseball card or a unique house. Virtual goods can be transformed into an NFT using the ERC-721 protocol.
The NFT market is lucrative and fast-growing. Converting your virtual product into NFTs will skyrocket your sales. Research has proved that every avatar wants to own a unique product in the digital space.
Interestingly, the virtual goods market is expected to increase in size substantially over the next few years. In 2015, the virtual goods market was worth around $5 billion. By 2025, the value of the market is expected to exceed $250 billion.
5. Create Your Own Community
Once you’ve established your ground on various marketing platforms, you can now create yours. As I mentioned, the relationship established with avatars will further help you grow your community. The English adage says, “Single drops of water make a mighty ocean.”
The trust avatars have in your campaigns will also propel them. They will invite more avatars to join your community. The community will be managed with relevant experience gained from other platforms.
The consequence is that you will have more audience see your campaign, your brand/ the brand you promote will also gain more exposure and traffic. Most importantly, you will have a larger audience to interact with.
On the other hand, a marketing agency like Blockwiz can help you create your own metaverse platform. You don’t need to pass through the rigor of the process. Everything will be sorted.
The Key Takeaway
While many businesses are already leveraging the metaverse for promotions, metaverse marketing is still a relatively new field. Moreover, marketing in the metaverse requires some sort of expertise just like digital marketing. It is, therefore, always better to work with established players in the crypto marketing domain like Blockwiz.
A crypto marketing agency can take care of all your marketing needs and deliver the best results within a set timeframe. After all, marketing in these virtual worlds is all about offering your target audience an immersive, valuable experience to boost credibility and authenticity. So, now is the time for you to adapt to the best marketing techniques for your project.
