Blog

In this new digital age customers are looking to be educated and entertained before they’re willing to be sold and promoted to. Content marketing started as a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing consistent, relevant, and highly valuable content to attract and retain this new breed of customers and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Video, podcasts, infographics, webinars, charts graphs, memes, gifs and free premium content in exchange for valuable customer information is all fair game today. Companies are making billions while simultaneously wiping their non-content generating classic-marketing “competitors” clear off the map, into obscure irrelevancy.

But the market is catching up. There are few trade secrets left to be discovered. So how do you stand out in the crowd? In many cases, next generation technologies and implementations might be the answer.

While Virtual Reality has appeared to stagnate in the video game world over the last couple of years, VR for business has been booming. VR gaming platforms have not done as well as their console counterpart, because lack of quality (and often quality) of experience. It would just be too expensive to create a Grand Theft Auto VR or Fortnite VR experience, the executives exclaim. The interactive and immersive nature of VR often mean the costs would just be too high, and so the games are often just not as “complete” and addictive as what we have become accustomed to on consoles and PC.

But the business world is different. The cost/benefit ratio calculation is astronomically in favour of the business case in many markets. Here are just a few examples:

1. A mechanical engineering University with a class of 200 students buys a $200, 000 piece of equipment that can only be worked on by 5 students a time. A $150, 000 investment into a VR simulator of the equipment and associated headset hardware now means every single student can improve the functional skills with the equipment at the same time. Even from home! Even over the summer! At 25% less of what the original machine would’ve cost. If they were planning to buy 2 or 3 real world machines, the number get even better.
2. A personal trainer charges $60 an hour for a personal training session. He has to incur travel costs, and can only train one person at a time in their home. With a VR solution, he can now train a dozen people at once, without any of the travel costs or time lost in transit.
3. A construction company has to convince buyer to purchase units based on sketches in order to complete construction. Later, realtors have to bring potential buyers in, one at a time, incurring travel expenses, and so on. We all have experiences with our realtor being late, or going to the wrong building, or being unable to find the unit key. Buyers often have to fly in from other countries just to consider a new property. With an innovative VR solution, all these explicit and implicit costs can be addressed up and down the line, totalling in an ROI of millions of dollars.

In the early days of the internet, with the rise of email, something special happened. No matter where you went, you were always home. Whether it was at a library, a hotel, your friends PC, or a cell phone, you could log into your email and be “home again”.

Now, with VR, you can stay home, and go wherever you like. This cannot be overstated. In combination, these two realities are set to change the world forever.

Think about what the cell phone did to the house phone. What YouTube is actively doing to the cable TV market. This is the difference between getting ahead of the curve with VR, or waiting for it to become the standard. This is an opportunity like no other on the market today. And not just as a disruptive operational business tool.

When it comes to digital marketing, we all feel like we have seen it all before. This is why email has gone from 93% in the 90s to 20% (if you’re lucky or highly skilled) in 2019. We’re just not excited to receive an email any more. Google ads exploded, then Facebook ads exploded, and while these are all still very effective tools, they are just not exciting to the customer. They take one look at the copy, and feel like they know your whole game already. This is the B2B world and we have all read a lot of the same advice.

But integrating VR into your process means you can now wow the customer again. Stand out in the crowd. Blow your competition out of the water, because they’re so 2015, it makes you yawn.

Sure, not everyone has a VR headset. But guess who does? People who are “doing well”, who have the funds to purchase the types of B2B solutions you are selling. And the lack of quantity of experiences on their device, means they are more likely to engage with your content!

Besides, nobody says you have to only market to people in their living rooms. You can put your VR hardware in a Hotel lobby, a mall foodcourt, or the middle of Times Square and the novelty of the experience means you are almost guaranteed to get engagement. This is integrated marketing at its core. This is experiential marketing on steroids. People find VR interactive, fresh, awe inspiring and, perhaps most importantly, memorable.

– The UN1T Team