With the latest rebranding of Facebook, the term “metaverse” has begun to crop up more and more in different contexts, from fashion, social media to education.
Metaverse enables users to immerse themselves in the multiple layers of the digital world. These layers represented in the physical world create a much more 3D experience for the users. This is the natural evolution of the way people engage and connect online. It broadens and enhances the existing virtual expertise, offering a different digital pace for all aspects of everyday life.
Already, there are examples of how media, entertainment, law, sport, commerce, and fashion industries can find their unique audiences in the metaverse.
Understanding The Metaverse
The metaverse is a collaborative virtual space that allows users to represent themselves using virtual avatars. This is a growing and evolving virtual world based on user interactions and decisions, reflecting that the natural world doesn’t have an “end.”
Imagine getting access to a virtual universe that lets you create a whole world, bringing in your real-world physical experiences with you.
Today, virtual reality professionals estimate that 58.9 million people in the US leverage AR and VR, a minimum of once a month—that’s 17.7% of the total population of the United States.
Here are the critical characteristics of metaverse as outlined by Matthew Ball.
- Always active.The metaverse doesn’t go inactive when you leave them. Neither do they end? They continue for an indefinite period
- Works in real-time.Metaverse has a timeline that is in synchronization with the timing of real-world
- Players have specific agencies.People can be doing unique and individual activities simultaneously. For instance, one can stand still in the corner whereas others interact with each other
- Fully functioning and self-contained universe.The metaverse is a fully operative universe that enables the users to generate, own, invest and sell. Also, users get identified and rewarded for their work in the metaverse.
- Combination of different platforms.Various platforms can work collectively in the metaverse. For instance, in the example of video games, you can bring items from a particular game to another one
- User-generated content.The metaverse is more than merely virtual spaces for people to hang out. As a user, you can generate content that other users/visitors can also enjoy
Tips for Law Firm Marketing in the Metaverse
As a law firm marketer, it is essential to keep up with the latest technological developments, including comprehending the metaverse and its potential.
The global pandemic forced law firms to overhaul their leisure and working practices, propelling them to take advantage of digital marketing opportunities. This accelerated the need for digital transformation.
The dependence of companies on the digital world has become incredibly prevalent. As the world is starting to open up and going back to normalcy, it is vital to realize the importance of metaverse. The experience focuses on the other-worldly abilities of the digital landscape. It brings the natural world and virtual one closer together in many ways.
Here are some tips for effective law firm marketing in the metaverse.
Create An Immersive Experience
As a law firm marketer, you can offer virtual ads for your clients in the metaverse. For instance, a video game advertisement company, Bidstack, shifted from working in real-world outdoor ads to placing virtual billboards ads.
However, there’s more to providing an immersive experience than merely using virtual billboards so that you can go beyond it. Since the metaverse is immersive and experiential, it is good to benefit from this by providing an authentic, immersive experience to your audience through your marketing initiatives and ads.
Conduct events and offer branded installations that help your specific audience interact with, instead of just running simple ads. There are some early movers who provide immersive experiences to their respective users.
Don’t Forget The SEO
Just like marketers are implementing optimization to get noticed in search engines such as Bing, Google, and YouTube, it’s the right time to begin analyzing the way to get your law firm noticed in the metaverse.
As a legal marketer, you can accomplish this by risking their claim in a community or platform that aligns with your audience.
So how can search engines be the gateway to search result dominance in the metaverse?
Use the term “metaverse” with your brand or company name, for starters. Then, create dedicated content, adding the term in the titles and meta descriptions.
Legal marketers must learn all they can about search engine optimization (SEO) for well-known platforms like YouTube, Bing, Google, etc. Then a similar plan should be followed to make metaverse a part of your efforts.
A viable strategy that leverages all the right keywords can make a lot of difference in how easily your audience finds your brand in the metaverse. Additionally, it can appeal to the relevant and intended audience, bringing them in via social platforms and organic search results.
You’ll see that social media platforms such as Snapchat and Facebook have also entered the metaverse with VR devices and platforms such as Spectacles by Snap Inc. and Facebook Horizon. So you can create more comprehensive social media strategies to include your very own take on the metaverse.
Invest In Local SEO, AR Content, And More
According to Google, AR or Augmented Reality overlaps digital information and content onto the physical world.
Leveraging AR for checking shoes, sharing techniques to apply cosmetics, or training someone how to do CPR are examples of various ways different brands can enhance their content and SEO strategy, positively impacting the search results.
Like other firms, law firms can also use these emerging technologies in the metaverse and improve the local SEO, AR content, and more. One of the critical facets of the metaverse is the significant role of image processing. Augmented reality, visual search, and virtual reality all depend on it.
Still, it is imperative to acknowledge that competencies in this field are still emerging, and those real-world applications are limited in nature.
Prioritize Visual Search
As stated earlier, in-depth and relevant content should be at the heart of your law firm’s SEO strategy. The more your legal content serves a specific need, the better it will be in terms of driving organic search traffic and SEO rankings.
This includes images and visuals such as graphs, tables, etc., as a highly effective content form. As Google gets better at comprehending the quality and content of images, this feature can help you differentiate your content from others.
Using AR navigation on mobile phones has also become popular. For instance, people use Google Lens to scan their environments and interact with the virtual world.
With Google improving its visual search abilities consistently for the metaverse, it’ll play a fundamental role in brand marketing strategies in the future. So make sure you perform an audit of your existing content marketing strategy to gauge how you can leverage and implement VR, 3D, and AR experiences into your plans.
Engage With Existing Communities
Typically, people don’t pay any heed to ads and marketing materials. So as law firms try to enter the metaverse, it is imperative not to bother people there already but enhance their experience of this new world.
Consider this as an influencer campaign where user-generated content is essential. Therefore community members become vital parts of the implementation of your campaigns.
Challenges For Legal Marketers In The Metaverse
The metaverse and its significant benefits also bring particular challenges for law firms.
For starters, data protection is a considerable challenge. As users create their digital versions to explore the metaverse, companies they are interacting with will know even more about who users are, how they like to engage, and what interests them.
Any law firm building a metaverse should consider issues like:
- Tell the visitors about privacy rights. Unfortunately, the metaverse doesn’t have any international boundaries. Therefore, it is essential to focus on the data protection laws in the metaverse. This can be an excellent opportunity for your law firm to educate individuals on using their personal information. But how can you communicate this and adjust this policy for someone from other international boundaries?
- Make your platform more secure. The more individuals invest in the metaverse to build their persona; a data breach can be a distress and, at a high level, even incur actual financial loss
- Consent fatigue. Data protection policies aren’t about consent. However, sometimes it is. Often, the license is used in the advertising world, a sector that will have significant avenues in the metaverse. However, with so many involved parties, there is a menace that metaverse participants will become exhausted from dealing with constant consent messages
Your metaverse strategy should be built with privacy in mind to overcome these challenges.
Finally, as metaverse is free for all, your law firm needs to be cautious in protecting your image. The more control your users have in the metaverse, the greater the likelihood that your law firm may appear next to debatable content. Also, there is a risk of getting your placements disrespected or vandalized by users.
As a result, it is imperative to be mindful, precise, and seamless with your marketing tactics so that users feel safe about sharing and engaging in that virtual space with you.
All in all, the metaverse offers a rewarding future for the internet and marketing, providing advertisers and marketers plenty of room for development and innovation.
Wrapping Up
This is an exciting time for legal marketers as the metaverse provides plenty of room for experimentation.
The best practices and techniques are yet to be established in the legal paradigm. Therefore, models must be comprehensively and thoughtfully created to allow legal marketers to experiment and develop unique approaches.
These immersive technologies are the future. The metaverse can unlock the power of exponential advancements to create and provide value to your law firm clients at scale. As a legal marketer, this new communication channel is in your hands. However, it all depends on how you use this incredible technology.
Let the metaverse marketing experts at Gorilla Web Tactics help you create a comprehensive marketing strategy that works well across the digital landscape.