The domination of the metaverse in commerce is not a far-fetched reality. According to data, VR and AR technologies, a vital part of the metaverse experience, will add $1.5 trillion to the global economy by 2030. That’s significant growth compared to $46.5 billion in 2019.
The metaverse will give your business a competitive edge by improving marketing, reach and brand perceptions, communication, accounting, and customer journeys.
More data shows that the metaverse market will grow by almost 40% over the next eight years as VR and artificial intelligence (AI) adoption rises globally.
Here’s what you need to know about the metaverse and how it will give your business an edge.
What is the Metaverse and What Does it Mean for Businesses?
The metaverse is a realistic 3D digital world where you can perform various activities such as signing and enforcing contracts, buying and selling goods and services, interacting with communities and customers, and recruiting and training talent.
These activities may be replicas of real-life ones or purely virtual ones. The experience will also include sensory sensations, where you can touch and hear objects within the virtual environment.
For instance, using the metaverse, consumers can have a virtual shopping experience in a car dealership in one part of the world, where they can touch and test-drive the vehicles and then move to another instantaneously to experience the competition’s offering.
What Makes a Metaverse?
The metaverse’s foundation consists of six key concepts that businesses can leverage to grow existing lines of business or create new ones. Already, companies in various industries, such as real estate, retail, and entertainment, have invested in them and earned profits.
These concepts include the following:
Economy
Cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and other blockchain-based assets, digital currencies, and exchanges power the metaverse’s economy. They underpin value exchange across the metaverse, with room for further innovation to incorporate governments, digital-only organizations, and other companies.
Therefore, individuals, businesses, and governments can conduct lending, real estate investments, payments, and more using trusted digital monetary systems.
Interoperability
A true metaverse has seamless interoperability among platforms and users based on web 3.0 and other emerging standards. This interoperability offers businesses new ways of reaching and understanding customers, albeit with new challenges of protecting and gathering data for privacy and cybersecurity.
Governance
The metaverse will operate with various rules of engagement for users, such as tax collection, regulatory compliance, and data governance. Authenticity and brand trust should be at the forefront, with a clear goal of reducing disinformation that has plagued the internet.
Identity
Identity on the internet today is linked to platforms. These identities may be anonymous, true, or pseudonymous. The metaverse will need trusted digital entities that transfer across platforms to identify assets, people, and organizations.
These digital identities may be central to data governance and collection in the metaverse.
Experience
The metaverse will offer unique experiences with unique aesthetics, tastes, ideals, and beliefs expressed uniquely by individual choices. Organizations will have to adapt new trends for user experience to win customer loyalty and better forecast consumer behavior and preferences.
Persistence
A true metaverse will persist whether you’re actively participating in it or not. The changes made by other users will also reflect in real-time, with smart contracts automatically enforcing agreements without your input.
This persistence will most likely require a new approach to digital asset management and activities by businesses.
What Does the Emergence of The Metaverse Mean for Businesses?
The metaverse comes with significant implications for current businesses. As is, the metaverse promises:
- Metaverse-only virtual products for companies to sell
- Richer customer experiences
- New customer data
- Phygital products, arising from the marketing and selling of digital and physical products and services
- New metaverse payments and finance
- Introduction of hardware and applications that support the metaverse experience
Most technology visionaries predict that the organizations running the metaverse platforms will not primarily control the platforms’ governance, data, and transactions. This will empower interoperability, where customers and businesses can carry their currencies, identities, assets, and experiences to any metaverse they wish, creating a very portable and customizable digital world.
Ways Your Business Can Gain a Competitive Advantage Through the Metaverse
Your business can leverage the metaverse and its features to outpace the competition. Here’re several compelling benefits of the metaverse for business:
Improved Marketing
Advertising on the metaverse will allow businesses to reach their audience using new mediums and create highly personalized experiences using integrated data analysis programs. These experiences will be accurate and non-invasive.
Data shows 71% of consumers are frustrated when shopping experiences are not personalized. Therefore, the gains from marketing personalization will be huge for brands.
Better Communication
The rise of remote work introduced communication challenges within workspaces, affecting employee productivity. The metaverse offers an interactive answer to this problem, allowing seamless collaboration and communication between remote teams to power fast product development and service delivery.
Data shows eight out of ten people believe communication can significantly contribute to their business’s growth. Therefore, the metaverse will catalyze fast business growth and improve the bottom line of most businesses.
Better Reach and Improved Brand Perceptions
Younger generations are hard to reach in today’s highly-fragmented media landscape. Roblox Games, one of the most active metaverse platforms, has 42.1 million daily active users, two-thirds being Gen-z.
The metaverse presents a valuable opportunity to connect with this audience and improve brand perception within the demographic.
Holistic Consumer Journeys
The metaverse serves the entire customer journey, from discovery, trial, and reconsideration, to adoption. It achieves this through immersion, interactivity, and interoperability.
Customers can discover products in a new way and have the chance to try them and experiment before committing to a purchase. For instance, skateboarding retailer Vans used Roblox to launch its interactive skatepark, “VansWorld,” and attract the interest of millions of consumers.
Improved Accounting
Accounting departments can use the metaverse to share and compile important information more efficiently and improve the performance of remote accounting teams working on complex data. The metaverse enables this through better data accessibility, enhancing accounting efficiency in businesses.
Accounting teams will also be better positioned to generate and analyze data that can drive critical business decisions and provide customized financial reports to business managers and clients.
Start Transforming Your Shopping Experience
The metaverse presents a new dawn for e-commerce. Get in touch with an expert today and learn how your brand can enter the metaverse through engaging virtual experiences.
Author Bio:
Efrat Tzory is the VP of Marketing at ByondXR, a retail technology company that developed a proprietary XR-enabled eCommerce platform to help brands and retailers take a step into the metaverse and create and manage virtual stores and showrooms that disrupt the industry by providing scalable immersive solutions that increase customer engagement and sales.
Efrat is a senior marketing and strategic advisor and a leading digital expert with extensive experience and a long record of proven achievements in senior management positions and strategic consulting. Efrat has over 20 years of experience in helping companies grow not only in awareness but in value, too. She has developed and executed B2B and B2C marketing strategies for top-tier consumer brands, and the largest energy companies in Israel, as well as startups and financial firms.
At ByondXR, Efrat is responsible for digital marketing strategies, creative marketing strategies, and growth management.
