With thousands of product choices and the attention span of a seconds, consumers are inundated with millions of messages every day. To catch their attention: your brand must be immersive, engaging, and offer the most personalized experiences. But, this is easier said than done, as one of the biggest challenges in executing this is earning, collecting, and activating the right customer data. One uptick we’re noticing for enterprises is XR (extended reality) technologies – a “not so new”, but critical, way to accelerate your earned data strategy. In fact, the XR market is expected to reach $345 billion by 2030, a significant increase from its 2022 evaluation at only $35.14 billion, according to a recent market analysis, so this is extremely opportunistic for today’s marketer.

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A XR Technology History Lesson for Today’s Digital Marketer

XR technology encompasses VR (virtual reality), AR (augmented reality), and MR (mixed reality). Now, many enterprises are merging their XR strategies together with their data strategies to accelerate new, immersive campaigns.

Before XR technology popularity spiked, digital marketers were dealing with major disruption in acquiring customer data. Privacy regulations began to impact the quality of their lead generation data, but they also caused brands to revisit their methods of how they nurtured their owned customer data for retention. Privacy regulations left no room for assumption, and then devices themselves became a factor when consumers gained deeper control of their privacy choices, having the ability to opt out for tracking. Now, fast-forward to today, even stronger privacy regulations coupled with third-party cookie deprecation and signal loss, plus throwing a challenging economy into the mix offers even more challenges for digital marketers.

So what does this history lesson have to do with XR? It sets the stage for this technology today because XR requires a heavy investment and skilled digital marketing force to execute. XR has transformed from merely a VR headset to a sophisticated digital marketing strategy that can offer contemporary and captivating experiences in return for earned data. But it doesn’t end there…

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The Prize for Earned Data is a Two-Way Street

Consumers today expect hyper-personalized experiences. And, the immersive experiences XR brings goes hand-in-hand with earned customer data. For example, AR experiences have the most promise in authenticated access, where consumers can interact not only with the brand, but with the community that the brand has assembled. Additionally, XR can help capture a deeper look into consumer behavior and feedback, with additional (critical) data sources that help complete the 360-view of the customer.

The ultimate value with the immersive experience will look a lot like the framework with traditional earned media. The difference with XR is that the buzz is going to take place in real time, in an exciting virtual place that the brand has gained merit for providing. With first-party data being secured and activated intelligently, we’re going to see these channels converge in the larger journey and ultimately improve conversion and loyalty.