Decentraland, Roblox or Fortnite: how to choose the right metaverse for marketing
- Younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha grow up in proto-metaverses
- They are hard to reach via traditional marketing and even on social media
- Essential to understand metaverses’ characters before choosing one as targeting platform
The metaverse, knowingly, is a virtual world where users can shop, socialize, attend live concerts, and others, providing opportunities for brands to promote their products or services. Giants such as Gucci, Nike, Addidas, Walmart, Gap have already made their presence in the metaverse to reach the next generation hoppers although there is not only one single metaverse. With many of the world’s biggest brands getting involved, should we enter the metaverse? How to select the best entrance? And how to build a brand’s metaverse strategy?
Why do some brands enter the metaverse?
The young generation grows up in proto-metaverse games, such as Roblox, Decentraland, Fortnite. According to Statista, 38 percent of gamers between the age of 10 to 20 have played a proto-metaverse game in the past six months in 2021.¹ Roblox has more than 55 million daily active users with 25.5 million under the age of 13, 3.8 million hours of engagement as of Q1 2022.² Decentraland has a monthly active user base of about 300,000 people and 18,000 daily users.³ According to Similarweb, around 60% of Decentraland’s desktop visitors are below 34 years old. Fortnite has over 80 million monthly active users and 350 million monthly players with over 60% of players in the 18–24 age bracket.⁴
Reaching the young generation via traditional marketing techniques and even on social media is difficult. Thus, brands are experimenting in the metaverse by launching NFTs to reach the younger generations. For example, a digital Gucci bag was sold for US$4115 at Gucci Garden on the metaverse gaming platform Roblox, higher than the cost of a real Gucci bag at a store price of $3400. According to Roblox, all of the brand partner events hosted in 2021 saw great success with millions of visits and nearly a third (or more) visits from 17+ year old audience.⁵
Nike also launched the Nikeland on Roblox. Visitors can create their own avatars and compete against others in sports-themed games in the Nikeland. In its first five months Nikeland was visited by 6.7 million people from 224 countries.⁶ In Fortnite, Travis Scott’s single grossed roughly $20 million, including merchandise sales.
How to choose the right metaverse for marketing?
As each metaverse has its own characters, profile of active audience and other elements such as interactivity. Here’s a general guideline on how to choose the metaverse.
1. Set an objective
Although there are huge opportunities in the metaverse, ranging from NFTs, live concerts, land investment, and commerce, we cannot invest without a clear objective. A virtual store can require an investment in the millions. Therefore, setting an objective is important.
2. Research, define the target audience, and devise metaverse strategies
As mentioned, there are already some metaverse-like experiences available like Roblox, Decentraland and Fortune, which have engaged audiences that present significant opportunities for brands, yet we still need to experiment as there is no playbook for the metaverse success. The following are some questions you may consider before working on marketing strategies.
- How important is your business to target a young audience?
- Why AR or VR or metaverse is right for your business?
- What do you want people to learn?
- How do you create values for the community?
- Do you have the in-house talents to help enter the metaverse?
- Do you have the skillsets for the overall strategies?
- Do your competitors enter the metaverse?
- How does the journey look?
- How do people talk about the metaverse on social media?
Different metaverses have different characters. As an example here, I use Python to retrieve 200 random tweets from users’ timelines on Twitter (larger sample size should be used to give a more accurate and decent analysis) and create word clouds in relation to Roblox, Decentraland, and Fortnite to see if there are any insights.
According to the following word clouds in relation to the keyword “Roblox”, the highest frequency words that audiences using are “game experience” and “avatar”. While for “Decentraland”, I can see some frequency words audiences used were “music”, “exhibition”, ”nft”, “gallery”, event”, “festival”, “experience” and “live”. For the keyword “Fortnite”, the highest frequency words used were “item shop” fortnitegame”.
Social mining may not give us all answers directly. One of the challenges is that word clouds only emphasize the frequency of keywords, not necessarily their importance. And some words, such as “think”, “one” and “take” do not provide any context, so the meaning of those words may be lost. Therefore, we need to focus on a specific issue by blending different data points to verify the discrepancy and do the hypothesis.
To further explore the keywords from the word clouds above, I retrieve data from SEMrush to find out what people are searching for those keywords. For example, when the audience searches the keywords “Decentraland”, “Roblox”, and “Fortnite”, the search intent is informational. However, Decentarland is more navigational while Roblox is more transactional.
As aforementioned, the frequency words audiences used on Twitter were “music”, “exhibition”, ”nft”, “gallery”, event”, “festival”, “experience” and “live”, there is not surprising that the search intent for “Decentraland” is more navigational. We may consider using Decentraland for a brand awareness campaign.
And as to the “Roblox”, the search intent is more transactional, and words with the highest frequency that audiences on Twitter using were “game experience” and “avatar”, we may consider adding gamification to the marketing strategies and focusing on conversion.
The above research is just a starting point. Perform research as many as we can is crucial for marketing success. After selecting the Metaverse, the best way to learn is how to participate, create your avatar and go there to explore.
Decentraland:
Roblox:
Fortnite:
3. Metrics & measurement
One of the biggest challenges of measuring is to evaluate the return on investment as there are no clear metrics in the metaverse. Some awareness metrics, such as likes, followers, reach, and impressions and conversions metrics may be renamed to be more metaverse-friendly. However, some 3D environment or virtual reality metrics, such as head movement, eye motion, sentiment, speaking voice, and hand movement are still not yet defined.
Measurement is key in the marketing plan. Therefore, even if there are no standardised metrics for the metaverse. We still can use awareness and conversion metrics to get started.
Final Thought
The metaverse is still in its infancy. Each metaverse is stand-alone at the moment. Therefore, the experiment is more important than waiting for a playbook as the concept of the metaverse is quite new for some brands. In addition, the crypto world isn’t as safe as some people think. The huge fluctuations and lack of regulations are also the potential risks. Nevertheless, user behavior keeps changing. As digital marketers, we need to change our mindset to embrace the new era.
[1] Proto-metaverse game means Fortnite, Minecraft, Roblox
[2] https://ir.roblox.com/news/news-details/2022/Roblox-Reports-February-2022-Key-Metrics/default.aspx#, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1190309/daily-active-users-worldwide-roblox/
[3] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/decentraland-holds-first-mover-advantage-190349112.html
[4] https://www.eurogamer.net/fortnite-earned-usd9bn-in-two-years
About the author
Karen Lau is a Web3, Metaverse and NFT enthusiast. She has a passionate interest in applying the latest technology, such as augmented reality (AR), artificial intelligence (AI), NLP, and business intelligence (BI), to digital marketing for long-term growth. She successfully developed and evolved the company’s digital activities across online platforms.
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