What Is a Digital Twin and Why Use It on Your Marketing

When people first hear the term Digital Twin they may think of it as an avatar on the Metaverse or such, but it represents more than ever an important tool that can improve Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Internet of Things (IoT), and the Metaverse itself. Do you want to know what is a digital twin, where it all started, and how it can take your marketing to the next level? Keep reading!

What Is a Digital Twin?

Before starting, let’s set a bit of context about this new term.

As always happens when dealing with a big problem, digital twin came out to bring a big solution for the Apollo space program. It was first implemented by NASA in 1970: Apollo 13 mission suffered an explosion of its oxygen tanks. 

Having this in mind, NASA engineers recreated the electrical system aboard the spacecraft and came up with a series of steps to power it up preserving the energy that was left in the batteries. It all took less than two hours. It was a great solution and the birth of revolutionary technology. 

So, what in the first place began as a physical copy of a space module evolved into an indispensable tool that allows nowadays making virtual representations of logical and biological systems in a faster, cheaper, and safer way. But how does it work?

A digital twin is a collection of data of any physical asset that is gathered by various sensors to create a reliable and digital copy of it. Depending on the industry in which is applied, it may need the usage of drones or other IoT and Industrial IoT tools, in combination with advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to provide real-time information about the asset. 

Digital Twin Technology: a new way to solve old problems

From single pieces of equipment and components to a wind turbines and factories installations, digital twin technology can replicate many real-world items. But… what kind of problems can be solved using this technology? To answer to this question, let’s take a look at Singapore. 

Yes! This city created its own digital twin in 2014 and with it they started to track pollution, traffic, and climate, even they can measure the impact of new constructions. 

Digital Twin and Marketing: Now Everything Fixes In!

Knowing what’s behind digital twin and having seen some of its application in the real world, how can it be used in marketing? 

Since a Digital Twin implies a reliable copy of a process or an object, this technology allows companies to design and/or redesign products and marketing strategies on-the-go thanks to the real-time data collected from the costumers’ preferences. 

Therefore, a digital twin works like a virtual bridge between manufacturers and costumers because it let business know beforehand what changes need to be done to a product or service. This accelerates timing production, makes possible reacting to future failures, and saves a lot of resources since it let you try out different alternatives on a digital copy. 

With this tool you can know the desires, needs and requirements of your clients by tracking their data and their shopping behavior and at the same time you can find out what they expect from a product.

Alright, but are there other uses of digital twins on marketing?… The answer is Yes!

B2B Sales, Marketing and Digital Twins

Thanks to data collected by digital twins the positioning of a brand becomes more relevant and personal since it can bring to the costumers the exact product they were looking for. This also means digital twin allows to anticipate sales opportunities or set the exact marketing strategy for a specific target.  

Digital twin also let business have a personalized communication channel with costumers, which eliminates intermediaries and makes marketing more efficient.

Also, this technology can accelerate the grow of a business because it immerses a traditional business into the digital world, offering more clients and new marketing model. In addition to that, the manufacturers can upgrade an existing business by applying analytics, machine learning, and AI to digital twin. 

An example of this conjunction of elements may be UberEats. 

From Social Media to Your Table

UberEats uses its own Machine Learning named Michelangelo, which combined with data provided by digital twin can improve meal delivery time predictions, search rankings, restaurant rankings, search autocomplete and balance the number of driver-partners in high demand locations. Also, with digital twin this company is able to make an exact copy of its system in real-time, run tests on it and find out solutions to possible scenarios before they even happen.  

Facebook Ads Manager is another service that takes advantage of digital twin since the data given allows to design a better marketing plan, to know what items are requested by specific costumers –therefore, show the right ad to the right client-, and also to indicate in which part of a city a product may be or not sold by setting some parameters such as age, gender, profession, etc.     

As it can be seen, using Digital Twin technology helps in positioning your brand and makes it grow faster and operate smarter. But this technology demands new software and architecture development. Here are some providers. 

Azure Digital Twins is Microsoft’s twin software platform based on IoT that allows to create a new digital representation of things, places, process and real persons. It can be used in warehouses, offices, schools, stadiums, parks, cities, and even more.

MindSphere is a Siemens’ software that uses advanced analytics and AI to power IoT solutions with data from connected products, plants and systems to optimize operations, create better quality products and deploy new business models.

Oracle is another digital twin service that focuses on product lifecycle management and production scalability improvement. This software stands out among the others because they have included an additional tool: Oracle Big Data Discovery, which was designed for non-technical specialist.

Digital twin: Would you like to be part of this new way of marketing?

Here at Stringnet you will find support and guidance throughout this new tool that is a game-changer in the way you can do marketing and run business.  

We count on an expert team regarding marketing, metaverse, virtual reality, augmented reality, gamification, internet of things, and more. Give it a try in incorporating digital twin service into your client’s experience and see what this new technology can do for you and your clients.

Contact us now!