The power of experience is what drives us to go to a live concert when we can listen to the same music at home. It’s what makes the difference between watching a sports game in a stadium instead of on the television. There is just something viscerally different about participating in an event in a way that lets you be part of something as opposed to just watching or listening through some piece of technology. To create a unique experience requires a combination of sights, sounds, textures, tastes and smells that isn’t available in any other way.
Experiential marketing is essential to any modern marketing strategy in a time when the majority of consumers crave meaningful interactions with brands. And while many businesses understand the need to offer personalized experiences, they are still struggling to understand the basics of experiential marketing. So, we’ll take a further look into experiential marketing and ways to successfully integrate into your brand’s marketing strategy.
Why Is Experiential Marketing So Powerful?
Experiential marketing is about creating a meaningful connection between a brand and its customers. This type of marketing is designed to encourage customers to actively engage with a brand’s identity and its core values. By providing immersive experiences, brands can create an impression in their target audience’s mind that will stay with them longer than traditional advertisement would.
Experiential marketing provides customers with a chance to directly interact and build a meaningful relationship with a brand. For brands, experiential marketing offers an opportunity to increase customer loyalty and direct sales. Successful experiential marketing campaigns serve as ways to activate new customers with 65% of brands saying that their experiential marketing efforts lead to direct sales. Experiential marketing also provides a way to increase brand awareness and reach as evidenced by research that found experiential marketing to be credited with 50-80% of all word-of-mouth activity.
What Experiential Marketing IS and IS NOT
The goal of experiential marketing is creating an authentic branded experience for your audience that can happen both offline and online. Experiential marketing is different from event marketing or publicity stunts. It incorporates elements from event marketing but should be treated as more of a long-term strategy than a one-time event.
A great branded experience should always involve active participation and engagement from the audience, promotion of the brand’s message and values, and it should provide long-lasting value. If you are not providing all three of these elements, it’s not experiential marketing.
Allowing an opportunity for your target audience to actively engage with your brand can take many forms. You can ask customers to take a picture and share it on social media, take part in an online trivia game, or leave a testimony regarding how your products or services have improved their lives. Anything that lets consumers interact with your brand in a thoughtful and meaningful way will do.
Most brands do a decent job of promoting their products and services. Experiential marketing requires more than that. It requires the promotion of your message and values. Instead of telling your audience why your brand is the best, allow them to experience it for themselves. This will help ensure that the message stays with them beyond the initial experience.
Finally, a great branded experience is one that provides long-lasting value to the target audience. Brands that focus on providing short-term value fall short of true experiential marketing. A great branded experience not only stays in the minds of its participants, but it also encourages continued brand interaction in the future.
Types of Experiential Marketing
CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS are the most common type of experiential marketing. Hosting these interactive experiences are a great way to connect with your target audience while also providing them with educational value. While in-person classes and workshops are ideal, you can also host these opportunities online.
POP-UP EVENTS can take a variety of shapes and forms. You might offer a retail store, an art installation, or live performances. Regardless of the format, the goal of a pop-up event is to enhance the commonplace experience. Part of what makes pop-up experiences so engaging is that they are not designed to last. This activates a scarcity mindset within your target audience who will rush to be a part of the experience before it ends. For example, check out the Kotex Period Shop.
PRODUCT SHOWCASES are not a new concept and if not carefully crafted, can be entirely unmemorable. By incorporating technology and creativity, brands can offer a showcase that is a truly immersive experience that allows for personalized interaction between customers and the brand. Live events such as product demonstrations can help consumers better understand a product or service better than static advertising methods.
Common Features of Experiential Marketing Events
Clearly Defined Goals
Major requirements for any successful marketing strategy are a set of clearly defined goals and a strong understanding of what the brand is trying to achieve. It is imperative to understand why the event needs to exist at all. Are you seeking brand awareness? Brand exposure? New leads? The type of experiential marketing tactic you choose to use and how you execute it will be determined completely by the goals you’ve defined.
Authenticity
Understand what makes your brand unique and leverage those factors. Stay as true to your brand identity as possible. Emphasize your brand’s core values and messages as you give your audience a chance to experience what your brand is about.
Tell a Compelling Story
The best stories are the ones that either provide a solution to your customers’ pain points or that tap into a larger, more socially conscious story. So, beyond telling a compelling story, invite people to be a part of that story. You can use experiential marketing to not only acknowledge your customers’ challenges but also to demonstrate what their life could be like with your brand in their life.
Collect Customer Information
Experiential marketing is the perfect way to gather important feedback and insight from customers on how they view your brand. Use interactive quizzes and polls not only as a way to create more touchpoints with your target audience but also to provide opportunities for your brand to gain customer insight. We’d also recommend that you create a process to monitor social media channels for any branded hashtags you employ to see what people are saying about you online.
Measurable
Peter Drucker is often quoted for saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” Establish how you will measure the success of your experiential marketing campaign. The key performance indicators you choose should be determined by your previously defined goals and should be tracked, analyzed, and responded to.
Wrap Up
Brands are becoming more aware that the key to beating out their competition is to build a strong, lasting, and engaging relationship with each of their customers. The most effective way to do that is to leverage the power of experiential marketing. Delivery extraordinary experiences should be an integral part of your marketing strategy. The experts at Strategy Driven Marketing would love to learn more about your business and help you brain-storm how your brand can reach out and connect with your audience in a meaningful way and actively engage them with your brand identity and core values. Contact us today to get started!