Where Virtual Reality Fits In Your Marketing Funnel (If It Fits)

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Lowe's Holoroom; Photo from Lowe's and Marxent Labs

In my recent report for Gartner’s marketing clients, “Virtual Reality: What Marketers Need to Know Now,” I share an organized and cautious approach to ensure marketers get value from any investments made in virtual reality (VR) programs. As with past digital innovations, VR is creating excitement as agencies gear up their VR practices and marketers seek new ways to reach consumers. But what we can learn from past digital innovations is that the best use of VR will not be flashy top-of-funnel strategies that seek to gain awareness but programs lower in the marketing funnel that improve customer experience.

When innovations occur in communications and technology, the marketing department is often the first within the organization to act. Your marketing group likely took the lead in creating the original website, launched your company’s first social media profiles, and deployed the first mobile applications.

But while marketing’s willingness to experiment is both admirable and necessary, not every experiment pays dividends, as fan-accumulating Facebook contests, ignored advergames, abandoned Second Life islands, and other innovative concepts often failed to deliver the results marketing needs and wants. By learning from the past, we can see that the solution for marketers is to anchor their VR experiments not at the top of the funnel but toward the bottom and to understand where VR can best enhance their brand’s customer experience.

To learn more about how marketers can align VR to customer experience needs and deliver better VR programs, and to see how Lowe's Holoroom program meets both brand and customer expectations, please continue reading this post on my Gartner blog.