How your Business can Leverage the Metaverse

In 2021, Mark Zuckerberg rebranded Facebook’s suite of products to Meta. This wasn’t just a rebranding. It was an introduction for most individuals to the concept of the metaverse: an internet that is less akin to a utility and resembles more of a separate, immersive virtual reality. Since then, this concept has grown in popularity. Many companies, including Meta, have a lot to gain from leveraging the metaverse, and working towards it. 

According to Grandview Research, the size of the metaverse market is projected to grow almost 40 percent over the next eight years, as the use of things like virtual reality and AI continue to rise in technological trends. Even as the metaverse continues to evolve, companies in a variety of industries can utilize the growing metaverse in several ways, offering unique advantages to their processes and departments. 

Marketing 

Advertising on the metaverse can allow businesses like accounting firms to reach audiences with new mediums, and create personalized experiences for potential clients using integrated data analysis programs. Being able to provide accurate, non-invasive personalized experiences is an incredibly valuable tool for any marketing team. 

According to a Segment report, 71 percent of consumers feel frustrated when a shopping experience isn’t personalized. Utilizing the metaverse in marketing to provide tailored experiences to your customers can help increase customer satisfaction, which can translate to things like client retention. 

Because the metaverse is still a relatively new and fresh medium, this can be a great time to experiment with new ideas and executions. Brainstorming a diverse array of ideas can improve your ability to reach new audiences and give you new data to interpret and build on.  

Communication  

One of the reasons the metaverse has gained so much traction is its utilitarian use in remote workspaces. The rising popularity of remote work can pose challenges to workplace communication. Remote employees can work in different time zones, at different hours, and even in different countries. 

Hybrid companies, which utilize a mixture of remote and in-person employees, can face even more challenges in fostering effective communication between teams. Communication is vital not just for carrying out tasks, but for creating a sense of company culture for remote workers. Efficient communication can help improve productivity and employee satisfaction. 

Companies can utilize the metaverse to enhance communication and make collaborative work easier and more efficient and help employees connect through technology. The metaverse gives employees the ability to not just communicate, but to interact virtually in unique ways. 

Not only does this allow employees to communicate with each other, but also to communicate with clients or management in ways that feel more interpersonal. And with self-reports of business communication at an all-time low — nearly eight out of 10 people believed their business had room to grow in regards to communication — better communication is more necessary than ever before. Implementing the metaverse in every department can be a great start to impacting the quality of communication within your company.  

Accounting 

In more specific terms, accounting departments can use metaverse technology to compile and share important information more efficiently. This is incredibly important for remote teams, as well as teams that access and work with large and complicated accounts. Accessibility is vital to remote work, as 24/7 access to data can increase remote workers’ productivity and efficiency in everyday work. 

In the past, many remote workplaces utilized cloud storage for this same purpose. As of 2019, nearly 91 percent of businesses used a public cloud storage solution. This statistic is expected to grow with time, but with the introduction of the metaverse, some accounting departments may find better storage solutions within the metaverse. Since the metaverse is essentially a decentralized storage solution combined with social interactions we find on the internet, it meets multiple demands that many accounting departments may have.

The metaverse can also increase the accounting team’s ability to generate and analyze data and provide customized financial reports for clients. As we’ve mentioned, there are plenty of benefits to being able to provide customized experiences to clients. 

Event hosting  

Public relations departments within businesses can increase brand exposure by hosting “hybrid events” that are open to both in-person and virtual attendees. These events increase accessibility to attendees as well as presenters. By creating more accessible events, you can increase your reach as well as reinforce company values, such as inclusivity.  

Additionally, metaverse technologies can enable brands to make the virtual aspects of their events more engaging and interactive. Engagement at virtual events can help you reach your event goals. It could also include qualified leads, generating brand recognition and capturing ROI for stakeholders. 

Digital products  

With the market for digital-only products increasing, companies can raise their revenue by developing and marketing these same products using the metaverse. Developing these products can serve multiple functions. For one, they can help expand the reach of your brand name. 

For another, most of these products can also serve as a function for your audience as well that may be greatly needed in the digital age. According to TotalRetail, 74 percent of online purchases made in the last year were for a digital good or service. This could include things like:

• online webinars and classes
• music
• downloadable content for video games
• online templates
• digital memberships

By using the metaverse, departments that produce digital products can create more immersive digital products and services that help diversify your revenue stream. 

Product testing   

The metaverse can not only make it easier to develop digital products, but it can also make it easier and cheaper to test new product ideas. By being able to perform quality assurance virtually, research and development (R&D) departments can reduce the overhead costs of hiring product testers, renting out space and even producing prototypes. 

Virtual testing in the metaverse can even increase the stringency of testing. By putting products through a wider variety of circumstances without fear of prototype damage, some R&D departments may find some more success.

Advantages of the metaverse for businesses

Incorporating new digital tools of all kinds into operations can often benefit businesses in major ways. Not only can digital tools reduce overhead costs, but they can also improve efficiency and give departments a competitive edge by staying on the cutting edge of trends. 

As the metaverse becomes more commonplace, it may also become a useful tool and skill to find in potential new employees. If this comes to be, human resources departments will be able to reduce time wasted in training and turnover. Instead of requiring employees to take time to become familiar with certain business technologies, employees will already have a knowledge base established beforehand.

Other advantages of utilizing the metaverse include giving your departments better resources that can result in increased output and ROI over time. 

Larger reach 

By utilizing multi-channel marketing, such as using the metaverse alongside other channels, including advertising and social media, marketing departments can increase their ability to reach larger audiences. In specific terms, this is known as brand awareness. The more aware audiences are of your brand, the easier it is to achieve conversions and brand equity. 

With creators constantly coming to the forefront of society with the help of new and innovative apps like TikTok, all departments need to be on board with new technologies like the metaverse. The more approval businesses have, the easier it will be to rise in the eye of the viewer. 

Creative freedom  

Advertisers have more creative freedom when developing campaigns for the metaverse because it is still new and evolving. This can benefit marketing by allowing brands to create more stimulating content using a wider variety of media types. 

Fine-tuning the creative process for different channels also helps improve efficiency and increase overall ROI and success metrics for marketing campaigns. 

More ways to monetize 

Using metaverse technology can give companies another way to make money from consumers. By creating the digital products we discussed earlier in this article or selling tickets to virtual events through the metaverse, companies can diversify their income streams, which is beneficial to all departments. 

Now, because of the relative novelty of the metaverse, you can offer these events or products for lower prices, driving more people to them. This not only improves income, but it increases visibility on metaverse offerings. 

There are several ways that all the departments of a company can utilize the metaverse for the benefit of their specific department, as well as the overall company. Since the metaverse is still in its early stages, products and events created on and for the metaverse may need some more specific fine-tuning. The only way to improve is to dig in and work with it to ultimately improve results.