Key Points

  • The metaverse offers vast potential for businesses with revenue generation methods like immersive advertising, influencer collaborations, virtual events, branded virtual spaces, and innovative product placement.
  • Effective metaverse advertising requires a thorough understanding of your objectives, comprehensive audience analysis, strategic platform selection, a strong metaverse presence, and regular testing and adjusting of strategies.
  • Playwire, with its 15 years of experience in the metaverse, offers comprehensive strategies and services for successful metaverse advertising, guiding brands through each step of their journey into this new virtual world.

The metaverse is the bustling virtual city of the future.

It’s filled with unique shops, diverse neighborhoods, and an ever-growing population. To put this growth in perspective, one of the most popular metaverse platforms, Roblox, hit 66 million daily active users in the first quarter of 2023 — that’s about the population of France.

Unlike a traditional city, though, this one is unconstrained by physical limitations or geographical boundaries. 

Just as businesses would in any city, brands can generate revenue in the metaverse by providing services or experiences to users. Instead of physical storefronts, they use immersive virtual storefronts. Rather than static billboards, they develop interactive and engaging branded worlds.

If you’re wondering how to make money in the metaverse, you’ll find that it’s fundamentally different from traditional online advertising methods.

That’s what we’ll explore in this article. We’ll walk you through all you need to know about making money in the metaverse with advertising — let’s get started.

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Read the Complete Guide to Metaverse Advertising

Why Brands Should Care About the Metaverse

If you’re a brand, you might wonder why you should care about the metaverse.

After all, isn't it just a new take on a digital playground closer to video games than a full-on digital revolution? That is quite far from the truth.

In reality, the metaverse represents a fundamental shift in how people interact, engage, and consume. 

Brands need to be at the forefront of this change. 

Here are a few key aspects that make metaverse advertising stand out:

  • Customer Engagement on a Deeper Level: Engagement within the metaverse goes far beyond scrolling, clicking, and typing. It’s an immersive experience that allows users not only to observe but become part of the story. This new level of engagement deepens the relationship between brands and consumers.
  • Global Reach Without Physical Borders: In the metaverse, geography doesn’t matter. Brands can reach a global audience without the need for physical stores, distribution networks, or shipping. This can significantly broaden a brand’s potential customer base.
  • Endless Creativity and Customization: The limitations of physical reality don’t apply to the metaverse. Brands only have the limits of their imagination and creativity. This opens new avenues for customization, allowing brands to stand out and offer up unique customer experiences.
  • Potential for New Revenue Streams: The metaverse introduces a new economy where virtual goods, services, and experiences can be monetized. Brands can sell virtual merch, host events, or even charge for premium brand experiences, opening up new avenues for revenue growth that don’t exist in the real world.

The metaverse is a new frontier for brands. It offers a chance to engage with customers in innovative ways, reach global markets easily, and explore their own boundless creative potential.

Making Money in the Metaverse

If you want to know how to make money in the metaverse, here are some key methods to tap into this new revenue potential:

  • Immersive Advertising: By creating interactive experiences that are also advertisements, brands can engage with users in novel ways. This can lead to stronger brand recognition and potentially direct purchases within the virtual world.
  • Partnerships with Influencers: As in social media, influencers hold massive sway in the metaverse. Brands can opt for influencer activations where these virtual celebrities promote their products, driving sales and brand visibility.
  • Virtual Events: Hosting a virtual event within the metaverse can open a plethora of new opportunities. Brands can sell virtual merch, tickets to the event, develop sponsorship deals, or offer exclusive content to event attendees.
  • Branded Virtual Spaces: These spaces can be places where users come to explore, shop, play, or just hang out. They offer numerous opportunities for monetization.
  • Product Placement: In the metaverse, product placement can take on new dimensions. Brands can have their products featured in popular virtual locales or events, or used by well-known characters or virtual influencers, or as collectible items that act as rewards for skill or effort, all of which drive brand awareness and lead to more sales.

Just like a bustling metropolis, the metaverse offers boundless opportunities for brands to make money. However, it requires a new approach to advertising and customer engagement. 

It demands strategies that embrace interactivity, virtual experiences, and the limitless potential of a world unbound by physical world constraints.

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Getting into the Metaverse: A Roadmap for Brands

Before you dive headfirst into the metaverse, it’s important to clarify why you’re there in the first place. 

Understand Your Goals

Your goals can be anything from building brand awareness and creating new avenues for customer engagement to simple product or service promotion. However, understanding your goal is a crucial first step as each objective will call for a different strategy and approach.

After you understand the why behind your metaverse advertising strategy, it’s time to define your target audience.

Understand Your Audience

In the metaverse, audiences aren’t defined only by traditional demographics. 

You might break down your audience by their behaviors, preferences, and the platforms they inhabit. To get metaverse advertising right, you need to understand the types of experiences your audience is seeking. 

Do they prefer exploration, social interaction, gaming, or educational experiences? This will guide your overall strategy.

Next, what platforms do they use most?

Understand Your Platform

There’s a wide variety of metaverse platforms, like Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite, or more niche, virtual reality (VR) based metaverses.

Just as you need to understand your goals and audience, you need to understand and choose your metaverse platform strategically. Look at platform demographics and things like brand compatibility. If you’re a brand that’s all about creativity, a metaverse platform that allows for user-generated content (UGC) might be a better choice.

After identifying your audience, goals, and platform, it’s time to build a presence.

Build a Metaverse Presence

Advertising in the metaverse is much more than money and branded digital assets. It’s about creating unique, memorable experiences for users.

To do this, focus on providing consistent and interactive experiences and elements. 

Once you’ve developed a clear advertising strategy, it’s time to test, measure, and iterate. This is often a step that brands overlook.

Test, Test, Test

With all the fervor and investment into the metaverse, most brands are simply jumping into the deep end and hoping for the best. 

It should come as no surprise that many experts argue the metaverse will become a multiple trillion-dollar industry by the decade's end. But brands looking to make a splash should still tread lightly in the new digital world. 

By focusing on establishing good feedback loops with users and finding key performance indicators that make sense in the virtual frontier, brands can better evaluate their progress and find areas of improvement.

Lastly, as this virtual space is evolving at breakneck speeds, brands need to stay informed and flexible.

They need to continually educate themselves about the latest developments, trends, and best practices while staying agile enough to adapt their strategies as the space evolves.

Get Metaverse Ready with Playwire

Navigating the metaverse can seem like steering a spaceship into uncharted cosmos — exciting, intriguing, and full of unknowns.

Yet it's in this vast virtual environment where brands can unlock untapped opportunities for growth, engagement, and visibility. It's not just about selling; it's about forging meaningful connections, fostering unique experiences, and truly immersing consumers in your brand.

Understanding how to make money in the metaverse requires a fundamental shift in how businesses view their audiences and how they interact with them.

That’s where Playwire’s metaverse expertise comes in. 

We’ve been building custom experiences and in-game developments in the metaverse for over 15 years, developing an intrinsic understanding of this new virtual space that’s unparalleled in the world of digital advertising.

At Playwire, we understand that successful engagement in the metaverse requires a long-term, committed strategy. That’s why we offer comprehensive, 360-degree approaches to advertising in the metaverse that puts your brand in the driver’s seat.

To get started planning out your metaverse strategy, connect with the team today.

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