Moving Towards Meaningful Engagement in the Metaverse

We’re rapidly heading from a digitally-endemic world into a meta-native one, with brands forecasted to spend billions of dollars in the metaverse in the next decade alone.

But how can brands be sure that their hefty investments into building real estate in these unexplored lands will result in a return which shifts the dial on any key business metrics? 

Brand success in the digital world has fast become synonymous with scale and mass, where figures are over-inflated and double-counted, whilst simultaneously business impact is often close to negligible. In the metaverse, meaningful engagement will no longer be associated with these idle, surface-level interactions. 

In this extended reality, real engagement will be intimately-linked with the core traits of deeper human relationships, with time becoming attuned with each other’s needs and in turn developing an interdependent bond. Successful relationships in this distant realm will depend on foreign brands adapting to the native users’ behaviors and expectations, never vice versa. 

Establishing quantifiable metrics across these key human traits will allow for brands to validate their success in these uncharted territories.

The fall of surface-level vanity metrics 

Today digital success is highly-concerned with aesthetics, focused on metrics which evoke a perception of pleasure for the brand, rather than the user.

With the Association of National Advertisers estimating that 20-35% of ad impressions come from bots, it makes it impossible for brands to pinpoint a true figure. 

Dwell time fails to report the active attention of a user and given that 95% of what users see is unconscious, inferring a cognisant timeframe will always be invalid.

Click-through rate is also quickly becoming a redundant form of measurement, with 58% of TikTok users delaying a brand site until after being served an ad, clicking is becoming an unlearnt instinctual behavior. 

The persistence of health-related metrics  

Some diagnostic measures of brand success will transcend into these new worlds, specifically where they are intrinsically-linked with the core health of a brand. 

Brand awareness is the first step to forming a relationship with a user. Precise use of awareness measures are often used to form the basis of brand value and financial performance calculations. 

Purchase intent is the first point at which a brand’s value is realized by the user, utilizing real data to infer accurate financial and behavioral targets.

The transition to emotionally-rooted metrics 

In the metaverse, brands will have the opportunity to rethink what constitutes meaningful engagement, and more importantly to determine who it will favor: the brand or the native user. 

Earning a user’s confidence is the first step to forming a bond, in turn allowing them to trust in what the brand can offer to their world beyond a once-off interaction. This is indicated by the sheer volume of brand conversations within closed communities on native platforms such as Discord or TeamSpeak. Although not a direct correlation with confidence, it is these grassroots communities that have the power to instill this amongst each other.  

Feeling understood is the foundation of psychological safety, without safety any meaningful relationship ceases to exist. Where one is empathetically-fulfilled, trust and dependence can prosper. This is shown by the percentage of positive brand conversations yielded in safe, closed communities.  

A mutual respect is integral for any relationship to develop, enabled when two separate parties with differing vested interests, take the time to consider each perspective and above all respect one and others motivations. This is indicated by a user’s lifetime value across multiple interactions. Where there is a shared mutual understanding, the user’s lifetime value will continue to flourish. 

How distinctive an experience is, often determines the value intensity assigned to it and the emotional resonance placed on it going forward. The clearest proof of this is for brands to curate a NPS (Net Promoter Score), focusing on their unique value proposition for users beyond what is already accessible to them in their existing gameplays.   

Above all, complete and utter dependability serves as the basis for both human and meta relationships. This reliance can be proven by the propensity that users engage with brand experiences, using DAU (daily active users) as a guiding measure. Brands will also need to be as omnipresent in the metaverse as in web2.0 to satisfy this dependability, users will require seamless interoperability from one world to the next. Developing a CES (customer effort score) which considers the ease of user engagement and resolution time of request will gauge the intensity of this dependency.   

The metaverse will and should never belong to brands, it is a place where they should seek to be additive and never aim to play a central role. Ultimately, these new worlds will always belong to the native communities that founded them and any measure of brand success should always prioritise these communities before themselves.   

Olivia Stone is senior analyst at R/GA London