MIXED REALITY ROOMS (7 minutes reading time) By We now live in a remote-first world where 8 out of 10 B2B buyers prefer to engage with suppliers online rather than meet face-toface. This has led to webinars and other digital channels becoming a popular tool for businesses to reach and educate their target audience. However with the increased competition and saturation of webinars in particular, it’s becoming increasingly more challenging for businesses to keep their attendees engaged and retain their attendance online. Now to clarify, we are not the people trying to convince you to live in a a VR headset, in fact, our platform doesn’t use them. We are also not delusional enough to tell you this is the best place to interact with your prospects and customers, unlike some other companies. The best place would be in person and will be for a long time to come. We are simply providing you with a different way to connect with your target accounts remotely that is refreshing, sparks intrigue, appreciation and ultimately helps you stand out from your competition. So with digital fatigue very much real and in person attendance tanking, there clearly needs to be a shake up. THE WORLD HAS CHANGED... SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN 02 ‘Seven Minutes In Heaven’ is a tool used by B2B marketing and sales teams to engage new accounts and nurture them through the marketing funnel. The concept is simple, you as marketers set up an immersive interactive quest - like a video game - that prospects can play and have 7 minutes to complete. The quest is built around your hero content that you want your target audience to consume - this is content most likely currently being distributed through webinars, your blog, and social posts - and their knowledge is then tested through a variety of mediums such as quiz questions, scavenger hunts, and personalized games. And yes, it was inspired by the old fashioned high school game of ‘7 minutes in heaven’ where you would go into a cupboard with your crush. Prospects, crushes, is there really a difference? Ultimately, you want to spend quality time with them both and get them intrigued. SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN 03 WHAT IS 'SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN'? By Mixed Reality Rooms Here are five ways “7 Minutes In Heaven” provides a solution to this remote engagement problem: The spray and pray technique when it comes to outbound activities is diminishing and being replaced with product-led growth for companies with simple solutions and Account-Based Marketing (ABM) for companies with more complex solutions. Mixed Reality Rooms has been designed specifically for ABM so that you can set up and personalize an experience for each one of your target accounts quickly and easily, in just three clicks. You can also take this a step further by adapting the content (quest) based on the account you are trying to target and even populate the experience with short-form videos to welcome each prospect by name. HIGH LEVELS OF PERSONALIZATION. HOW THIS BENEFITS YOU: Prospects are impressed that you built an experience that looks expensive just for them and appreciate the personalized approach, equaling more positive responses. Oh and perhaps more importantly, the sales team finally gets off of marketing’s back... Who am I kidding, that ain’t ever going to happen. How often does someone build a game for you? In marketing we always hear that we need to give the sales team something to talk about and what that constitutes is usually more case study videos, upcoming webinars, blog posts, one-pagers, podcast episodes. These are good, serve their purpose and will continue to do so going forward however their limitation is they’re not two-way. Yes you could argue that webinars are two way because attendees can ask questions but let’s face it, we all know the majority of people have it on in the background, are only half listening, or more often than not, watching it on-demand. Which means they’re not present. The beauty of running a session in person is that 95% of the time you have their attention, and the same benefit applies here. Attendees must navigate through the quest in a prompt fashion, consuming interactive content and completing tasks to ensure that they are successful. The timer shows no mercy and ensures that attendees don’t click away or get distracted from the mission objective. IT’S INTRIGUING AND INTERACTIVE. HOW THIS BENEFITS YOU: Is that you learn more about the attendees in 7 minutes than you would over multiple hours of one-way webinars or just getting them to consume existing content in their own time. SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN 04 The obvious one but the 7 minutes in heaven quests that you set up for your target accounts can be accessed from anywhere in the world. You just need a computer and a regular internet connection. We have clients that have decided to partner with us who were previously sending out VR headsets to their VIP prospects in an attempt to get them to do their sales meetings in VR (headset) but they decided it was costing too much in time and resources. In addition to this, they had almost zero control over the prospects' ability to set up the VR headset in the first place so that they could join; if there were any problems with the hardware (headset) it made it almost impossible to fix. IT’S ACCESSIBLE AND ALIGNS WITH B2B BUYER BEHAVIORS. HOW THIS BENEFITS YOU: There is almost no friction, prospects can easily join the quest in just a click, just like a Zoom or Teams link. Also less wastage on cost. By breaking the pattern of monotonous 2D content you are rewarded with a higher level of brand recognition. Research conducted by Ogilvy suggested that people are 33% more utilitarian during an immersive experience. In addition to this, memoryOS stated using immersion increases memory recall by 70% and along with a 60% increase in the speed of that recall. It makes sense, humans are spatial creatures and weren’t designed to look at 2D screens. 70% BETTER BRAND RECALL. HOW THIS BENEFITS YOU: You become instantly memorable. SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN 05 Gifting challenges are solved. Having carried out our own research working with our partner, we discovered that the three biggest challenges with gifting and direct mail is: gifting can feel like a bribe, gifts are often very loosely tied to the products that the sending company is pitching, and there is friction in collecting postal details of the target prospects - especially now a large proportion of them aren’t in the office. Tackling those one by one, what do we mean by “Gifting can feel like a bribe”? Well what has the recipient done to earn this gift, no one likes to be guilt tripped and they know if they take it there is going to be an “ask” coming along somewhere down the line. Moreover, because they haven’t earned it, it devalues the gift in the first place and doesn’t capture their attention as much as you think it does. Think about when someone hands you a voucher or a flier in the street, the offer could be great but more often than not it’s going straight in the bin and it’s also taking up no headspace. IT’S ACCESSIBLE AND ALIGNS WITH B2B BUYER BEHAVIORS. HOW THIS BENEFITS YOU: Now if you get the prospect to complete a task you have some context for gift sending, eg. “Congratulations Valerie, here are 8 brownies for getting 8/10 on the (Brand name) (Cybersecurity) Quest), making the gift far more well received. Obviously gifts on their own very rarely do anything to teach the prospect about the products, solutions, industry knowledge or best practices you are trying to share with them. By sending them this 7 minutes in heaven experience you are not only making their day a bit more interesting but you’re teaching them in the process with short form, no fluff, high-quality content bursts. Lastly, during a Mixed Reality Quest we gamify the way that prospects provide you with their postal details and usually prompt them to do so when their engagement is at their highest, usually as they’re drawing to the end of the experience. SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN 06 SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN 07 Individually controlled, video-game perspective lets guests navigate the seven minute quest, consume content and test their knowledge through various mediums at their own pace - within the time frame of course. We’re reimagining traditional one-way content marketing and turning that same content into 7 minute interactive experiences. WHAT DOES A “SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN” EXPERIENCE LOOK LIKE? SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN 08 SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN 09 Once the prospect has completed the experience, you can download all the data from the experience to learn more about them and to help sales to keep the momentum flowing. Information like, which topic zone did they spent most of their time in, who they spoke to, what they are most interested in learning about, what score did they get in the quiz (often a good indicator of how much they know about your brand, industry, and solutions), what information they downloaded, did they want to book a follow up meeting. This can help sales contextualize the next meeting and provides a warmer intro. As marketers, your job is almost done but as mentioned above if you want to take it one step further you can send follow up gifts based on the prospects' in-play experience. Eg. “Congratulations Alfred, here is a bottle of champagne for getting the highest score this week on our “cyber security” quest. POST-EXPERIENCE ACTIVITIES (RECOMMENDED) SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN 10 WHERE DOES IT FIT INTO THE ACCOUNT-BASED MARKETING FUNNEL? SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN 11 CAN I MAKE IT LAST LONGER THAN SEVEN MINUTES? You sure can. We have had clients join multiple mission rooms together to build a quest that takes 60 minutes, still to good effect. Through multiple testing rounds with a range of different audiences we did find 7-9 minutes to be the optimal amount of time for each mission quest. Any shorter and you risk not leaving the attendees enough time that they can onboard effectively, getting a grasp of the controls, and then completing all the tasks within the quest. Any longer and you may begin to put some attendees off even attempting it in the first place. The way we see it, is that everyone has seven minutes. Short but intense, a bit like a teenage holiday romance, and most importantly, it leaves them wanting more. The timer itself was actually inspired by Rory Sutherland, VP at Ogilvy, who referenced in his book Alchemy that the best thing Transport For London ever did for to improve customer satisfaction of the London Underground - which is Subway for our american readers - wasn’t to implement more or faster trains, but to put up a dotted board that let passengers know how long they needed to wait for the next train to arrive. The same applies here, setting expectations with your prospects is not only good practice but imperative if you want them to engage with you. SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN 12 Highly-personalized and gets prospects intrigued.. Contextualizes gifting and the experience can be seen as a gift in itself. 70% increase in brand recall. Very scalable. Two-way interaction and you gather data on each prospect ie. How much do they know about your brand, how aware are they of the problem you solve, how intense is the problem and is it worthwhile having a one-toone call. MIXED REALITY ROOMS SOLUTION: Webinars = inviting people to webinars doesn’t work like it used to. Digital fatigue is real and slowing numbers. Not very memorable from a brand awareness standpoint. Attendees also have limited control over the experience and aren’t really rewarded for engaging. Gifting = can come across as a bribe, loosely tied to product, friction getting postal details, resource consuming. You also gather no insights from the prospect unless they agree to the next steps. In person events = expensive, time consuming, and in a post-covid world, people are less willing to travel. OLD SOLUTIONS: IN SUMMARY Mixed Reality Rooms is a browser-based platform that can be used to execute prospecting and sales enablement campaigns more quickly and effectively compared to alternatives such as, corporate gifting, webinars and hosting in-person workshops. It does this by combining gamified content delivery, immersive first-person perspective, and fun social interaction. SEVEN MINUTES IN HEAVEN 13 WHAT DOES THE MIXED REALITY ONBOARDING PROCESS LOOK LIKE? Mixed Reality Rooms has quickly-customizable environments for immediate use (under 48 hours from sign-off), as well as the capacity to build entirely new spaces in < two weeks. If you are an enterprise, most projects will take around six weeks to build working with your brand team. Full admin onboarding can be completed in under 60 minutes. You will also be assigned an account manager for ongoing support thereafter. HOW TO GET STARTED? To learn more about the Mixed Reality Rooms ‘Seven Minutes In Heaven” prospecting tool, please contact one of the team on this link.