Metaverse. A new channel for your Ecommerce

Instagram's reign as a sales channel is under serious threat from its own brand, the metaverse. There are already many brands present on this platform offering a wide variety of products, from plots of land, clothing, accessories or digital art thanks to NFTs.

How to advertise in the metaverse?

But if there is something that we in marketing want to know in depth, it is: How to advertise successfully in the metaverse?

We propose 3 differentiated lines:

• The first and product-focused one consists of using the WOW effect in the physical world. Through augmented reality we can see the properties of the product, visualise it on a different scale, manipulate it and investigate it in order to compare it with other options. If we are dealing with a service, we can immerse ourselves in the experience and the benefits, directly attacking the needs that the user needs to solve and the doubts that he/she wants to answer.
• The second line lies in product placement, i.e. we are going to place our brand and, above all, our values in the metaverse. In this way, we can dress our avatars with our product, place subliminal advertising along a route or, just as in everyday life, we can use advertising vanes to promote ourselves. We can be a display that adds value to the customer's virtual experience, create our own events and sponsor environments that our customer will visit.
• Thirdly and lastly, we have the possibility of being acquired as a unique product or brand, i.e. exclusivity thanks to Non Fungible Tokens (NFT), due to the blockchain backing. Thanks to this we have a traceability of who the real holder of the asset is. This last line can be combined with the previous ones as long as we are clear about our strategy.

What are the barriers to selling in the metaverse?

One of the main barriers in this new emerging marketing is the means of payment; while we can still talk about fiat currency (based on the belief of the community and the value established by the markets), we cannot leave behind the cryptocurrencies that are so much talked about nowadays. These have a wide range and their value is always associated with the dollar, so a standardisation of currencies, assets and backing them with NFT's will be the next step in the Metaverse and all that it entails in the coming years...

The metaverse, more than a passing fad

In recent months we have seen in the media a multitude of news related to the Metaverse using terms such as "a new world" or "a near future". So much so that Facebook itself has changed its name to become known as Meta, giving greater visibility to the new brand.

In this article we do not intend to talk about fashions, but about a revolution that goes beyond a virtual social network or video games. We are talking about multiple sectors: marketing, industrial, education, art and experiences, retail...

In this new world, the aim is to converge the physical world with the virtual world, although it is true that in 1985 something similar was already attempted, by means of telephone connections to a Lucas Art video game, Habitat, where one had to find treasures, by means of avatars and tokens. Today we have technologies that are advancing by leaps and bounds and that provide an amazing realism and synchrony in the experiences.

For this we need the union of hardware and software. With regard to the former, we have seen failures such as Google glasses, great potentials such as Microsoft's Hololens 2 or, finally, Meta's Quest 2, which democratise access with cheaper prices and which could be a key element in the market penetration of this new environment.

If we talk about software, we have a very broad catalogue of platforms. Some are already well known, such as video games, which have recently shown that they are social meeting points, the Ariana Grande concert in Fortnite being the best example. But we can also talk about sales platforms, as is the case with Gucci handbags on Roblox...

The next steps of the metaverse

We seem to have all the ingredients to create a good recipe, but we are missing two very complicated steps: interoperability between different media and continuity between video games, social experiences and the real world. Being able to access the Metaverse from any platform, any device and with the technology of your choice will be the next barrier to overcome.

In this line, several platforms are beginning to be less strict in exclusivity, as the pure Metaverse will be a decentralised space, using blockchain technologies and governed by each of its users.

Meta in this attempt at continuity between platforms has opened up the possibility of using its avatars to connect between different worlds, again with its intention to position itself in this paradigm. The metaverse continues to grow, evolve and reach out to us to become a new, immersive reality in our daily lives.

If you want to know more about sales channels, new spaces in which to promote your products or how to implement an ecommerce for your business, do not hesitate to contact us.