Why businesses will need 3D CMS to take on the metaverse
Alexander Feiglstorfer, CTO and Co-Founder of enterprise CMS Storyblok, discusses the 3D CMS tech that will be needed to make the metaverse function
Last year, the word on everyone’s lips in the tech industry was – ‘metaverse’. The grand ambition set out by a number of major tech companies to create interconnected virtual worlds. Love or hate the idea – thanks to unprecedented levels of funding – the metaverse is coming. For many companies, the metaverse poses a host of interesting challenges. Principally – how will they be able to use the metaverse to drive new business and engage with their existing customers?
We are of course at the very early days of this conversation. Bluntly, we simply don’t know what form the metaverse will take and how (or even if) consumers will use it. However, that doesn’t mean businesses can’t begin to look at the technology, skills, and strategy they could potentially employ to make it a success. After all, many of the brands that got the first-mover advantage on new channels such as social media enjoyed great levels of growth and engagement while their competitors were playing ‘wait and see’. There is another major advantage of looking at the tech platforms that will enable metaverse marketing – it’s an opportunity to look at a holistic update of existing tech stacks – but more on that later. Let’s start by considering what a new generation of marketing tools for the metaverse will look like.
CMS technology is currently geared towards a 2D world of emails, websites, apps, and electronic billboards. The best new tech enables marketers to create, manage and update campaigns on multiple channels with minimal interaction from developers or IT departments. In recent years, these solutions have been expanded to take into account data-driven personalization and new channels such as IoT devices. However, no matter the channel, the core concepts of delivering copy and imagery remain essentially the same. The metaverse is a different story. To make a sustainable marketing campaign we will need a 3D CMS solution. One which enables completely different ways for brands to interact with consumers. It will focus on the creation, maintenance, and modification of virtual, augmented, and other immersive content.
The crucial element of a 3D CMS will be that it will integrate with existing marketing channels. This means a headless 3D CMS will enable marketers to make instant changes on any channel – IoT, social, email, virtual store – without the need for longtail development projects. In essence, it will make virtual as adaptable and manageable as any other communication output. The challenge is that the only limit to the form these metaverse marketing experiences take is the imagination of a brand’s communication department.
To put this into perspective. Picture going into a virtual shop where every product and marketing message is tailored exactly to your needs. You see products you need in the correct size, placed in a way that you find most useful, maybe with bespoke offers and even a virtual assistant which knows your personal preferences. As you can see – a 3D CMS solution will need to leverage a huge amount more data than current systems and they will need to enable the creation and management of a massive amount of customer journeys. At the same time, they need to be easy enough to use so that companies don’t have to dedicate all resources to make it work.
So we now know what a 3D CMS will need to do and how a business could use it. The big question for now – is while this tech is being developed, what can businesses do to prepare? As briefly mentioned above, now is a good time to consider clearing away outdated legacy systems. This isn’t even a gamble on whether the metaverse will be a success. The reality is that marketing is only going to get more complex and at the moment, many brands struggle to cope with existing communications channels. We can all see it with poor-performing websites, the customer service struggle of having to repeat basic information on different channels, and inconsistent personalization. The philosophy many companies employ of trying to bend their existing systems to patch the problem simply isn’t sustainable. It may be a little daunting, expensive, and time-consuming but renewing your infrastructure will save a lot of money and pain in the future. A 3D CMS running with completely up-to-date systems will be an incredibly powerful tool that could open the door to better and cheaper communication, marketing, business intelligence, and product development.
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