Top Digital Strategy Tips for VR Vendors and Blending VR into Your Marketing
Joshua Georgiou, Senior Account Executive, Touchdown PR
Back in 2015, virtual reality was still considered extremely niche and not seen as a fruitful venture for most companies because of the technology’s complicated nature. Then, Facebook announced the Oculus rift, an affordable virtual reality head-mounted display that opened the doors for innovation in the VR space. From there came headsets, such as the HTC Vive, PlayStation VR, and the more recent Apple Vision Pro – which looks to be the latest iteration of virtual reality, blended with augmented reality. To explain these two versions, augmented reality puts a digital layer onto your live surroundings, such as allowing you to interact with a digital document in the middle of your table, while virtual reality places you in a digital environment that is either customized to your liking or prefabricated. The market size for virtual reality headsets in 2022 was more than USD 28 billion, and is expected to grow 15% in the next decade. These examples clearly demonstrate how, despite the high price of headsets, they are creeping towards becoming a norm for typical consumers.
The VR boom happened first in the video game industry, with Facebook creating exclusive video game deals to attract consumers to the Oculus platform. An exciting aspect of this tech also comes from its applications outside of the gaming world. If done properly, VR can be used to recreate what was just an ordinary living room into a dream room full of unique art and furniture, it can revolutionize how virtual or hybrid office meetings are conducted, and it can even be used in the medical field to take a deep dive into the human body.
Do you have an innovative product, and a need for some virtual reality marketing expertise to help launch it? Here at Touchdown, we craft impactful marketing strategies for our tech vendor clients, so speak to us about a project today.
3 Steps Organizations can Take for Implementing VR Into a Digital Marketing Strategy
Step 1
First, you need to clearly define who your target audience is and find out if they will react positively to a VR spin on your product. If you are low on human capital, looking for outside resources like a global PR agency can fill the gap. Touchdown’s team serves to truly be an effective part of your marketing team, almost acting as an internal branch. The team is well-versed in assisting with clearly defining demographics, researching interests, preferences, and key publications for placement, as well as getting the best eyes on your brand. Incorporating VR in marketing efforts, and ensuring it is tailored to fit your audience effectively, is one content strategy provided by Touchdown. Other methods of research may include conducting surveys and analyzing user data, which enables enterprises to further understand the desires, needs, or concerns of their target audience.
Step 2
Following the research stage, it is time to start attracting customers to your brand by creating engaging content. Brand perception is essential in today’s digitalized world, thus, having a content calendar featuring a cadence of blog posts, videos, tutorials, and examples of people’s experience with VR technology is advantageous. When showing your VR tech to the world, it must be shown in a way that is innovative and highlights how it differentiates itself from other VR platforms. These differentiating factors can include price, usability, or features. One step that can be taken is adopting influencer marketing, which can significantly amplify your brand’s reach and credibility – especially if the influencer is embedded with the VR sector. Collaborating with them to promote your products or services should prove useful in bringing new eyes to your brand, and these influencers can share their experience with your VR offering through reviews, live streams, and sponsored videos to generate interest and drive conversations around your technology.
On that note, Touchdown PR is well-versed in international business to business (B2B) technology marketing and can assist organizations with identifying their target audience while creating an ample public relations strategy to break into target publications. They can also raise brand awareness by promoting company spokespeople as thought leaders within the VR and technology field.
Step 3
Combined with the creation of engaging content, leveraging social media can help connect with a target audience on a global scale – especially for VR vendors. Virtual Reality is exciting, new, and still considered niche to the average consumer. Thus, your social media profile and website need to reflect that same excitement and new technology buzz. To hype up your followers around the technology, you can work with an agency to share some glimpses behind the scenes to elaborate on how the technology came to fruition while also showing your team’s positivity and fun. From there, hosting VR demonstrations at public places where prospective customers can demo the equipment and see virtual worlds firsthand can help spread word of mouth.
The goals are to get into industry news, establish leader expertise, and foster a community around your brand, which is where your PR team can come into play. Bringing in a team of proven media experts that can boost your publicity, build out your brand positioning plan, develop fresh ideas, and enhance your online presence are all items that Touchdown PR can tackle for your public relations campaigns.
Virtual Reality is Here to Stay and It is Making a Splash
There are limitless opportunities with virtual and augmented reality, and if adopted properly, it will revolutionize a variety of spaces to further digitize our world. Existing VR vendors need to take advantage of this ample opportunity and get their name in front of the right customers, media, and analysts who can help grow the brand and further innovate the VR technology. Bringing in a public relations team, especially one with global presence, can serve as a guiding shepherd to research your target audience, provide strategies for leveraging social media, conduct consistent market research on website traffic and social media engagement, and come up with creative ideas to interact with influencers at events.
Using the steps above in combination with a dedicated PR team, virtual reality vendors can trust that they are leaving their marketing efforts in safe hands. In technology, it is clear that no one can do everything alone, and collaborating is essential to continuously improve and grow. The same happens in marketing; having a dedicated agency with a good understanding of the industry serves as an asset to allow VR leaders and decision makers to focus their efforts on other key activities. This situation provides peace of mind for organizations, ensuring their marketing goals are being attained through the actions of their PR team.
Contact the Touchdown PR team here to learn more about how we can take your brand to the next level and help strategize your future media plans.
