Did I sign up for this?

NFTs?

Blockchain?

The metaverse?

You bet I did. And I hope you did, too.

The future has arrived. As marketers know (or are very rapidly discovering), life for brands is happening more and more online, and that trend is only going to increase.

Virtual worlds are transforming the advertising marketplace. In the metaverse, brand experiences will be utterly altered by the lack of real-world issues like product defects, customer service snafus, and faulty logistics – not to mention supply chain troubles or any other problem you can imagine. It’s a place where every marketer will have the chance (and responsibility) to bring their brands to life in new and surprising ways.

And that is mighty exciting.

One of the big, unanswered (and critical) metaverse marketing questions is not just, How will we get people’s attention? It’s, How will we track it? How will account-based marketing translate to the metaverse?

Here are some thoughts that aim to spur thinking and collaboration in this exciting and emerging new world:

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Uplevel Your ABM

Successfully taking ABM into the metaverse will require a refined skill set and a solid approach that captures and analyzes as much data as possible in a smart and effective way. No doubt this is what you believe your ABM is already doing. With the number of shifts underway, though, don’t take anything for granted. Review your current standing, root out possible improvements, and bring on really smart partners.

Quad is collaborating with 6sense for forecasting and predictive-modeling based on anonymous visitor information with AI-centric sales revenue pipeline conversion software. Tackling the dark funnel is a skill set that helps position us to more fully leverage the marketing advantages that are being revealed in contemporary online spaces. We anticipate that applications like this will translate to AI applications in the metaverse.

There is a lot of attention to capture in the metaverse, and now is the time to get busy. It’s less crowded in this space today than it will be in the next three to five years, when more advertisers and agencies will be vying for customer attention and making virtual land grabs.

Embed With Tech Partners

Your partners are only as useful as the access you give them to your data, your systems, and your people. You can deepen trust with your partners and maximize results by embedding yourself and your team in their technology. And you may be very surprised by where that takes you.

The Quad performance marketing team built an engagement tracking process for visitor behavior that was designed to operate within our CRM technology. This system allows us to create frictionless, personalized digital experiences that are based on information we garner before the visitors provide any personal data.

And, because we were forward-leaning and willing and able to go deep into the possibilities of our martech stack, the process we built turned out to be so advanced that we hit the tracking capability limits of our CRM partner. They were pushed past their understanding of their own technology by the extraordinary ways that we devised for tracking online behavior and engagement.

This type of initiative will come to the forefront inside of the metaverse, as both brands and consumers learn how to leverage this online world in new and productive ways. Brand marketers need to start having these types of conversations with their agency partners today in order to be ready for the opportunities of the future.

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Aim Up

As a performance marketer, my team and I live by the mantra, “Aim up.” We always look for the next edge to traverse, the next opportunity to fail (or succeed) forward.

This is a key aspect of the “better way” culture of continuous improvement at Quad, and it makes all the difference for getting the buy-in we need from company leadership to try new approaches and explore new marketing territory that can make all the difference for the ways our clients maximize the current and evolving marketing possibilities. We know that we have the skills, partners, and support to make the most of these new opportunities, and we know we can learn how to apply them in new and exciting online environments.

ABM is truly nascent in the metaverse. That opens unlimited possibilities for performance marketing. It’s a space where there will be fewer targets, less distraction, and more creativity. And that will mean a real urgency to allocate resources and attention to this exciting frontier. Rise Interactive, Quad’s performance marketing agency, is already engaging with Meta to collaborate on opportunities for brands to engage in the metaverse and strategies to prepare for metaverse advertising with Augmented Reality (AR) advertising.

No – we’re not yet where we want to be in terms of tracking interactions and behaviors, collecting meaningful data, and developing client solutions in the metaverse. Indeed, this journey is just getting started for all of us. But we are sure to make the most of it if we keep aiming up.