Marketing once meant billboards, magazine spreads, TV spots, and newspaper ads. The digital age expanded this toolkit, adding digital display ads, sponsored search results, targeted ads, and email marketing to the combo.
Reaching latest audiences has never been easier. But today’s consumers—barraged with marketing messages—have more demands on their attention than ever before. Experiential marketing means that you can forge authentic connections between your brand and its community. Here’s what that you must know to have interaction your customers.
What’s experiential marketing?
Experiential marketing—also referred to as engagement marketing, live marketing, participation marketing, and event marketing—focuses on engaging consumers by inviting them to take part in memorable, immersive brand experiences. Think pop-up shops, virtual experiences, brand activations, and live events.
The goal is to construct meaningful, emotional ties between your brand and your target market through a direct connection, often involving personal participation. Experiential marketing campaigns could be one-off projects, and so they’re typically a part of a broader marketing strategy that features traditional marketing tactics.
Experiential vs. traditional marketing: What’s the difference?
Experiential marketing differs significantly from traditional marketing, particularly in its goals and performance metrics. For instance, while display ad campaigns prioritize direct key performance indicators (KPIs) like cost per click, cost per thousand impressions, and conversion rates, experiential campaigns typically try to extend brand awareness or foster long-term customer loyalty—effects which might be tougher to measure and attribute. Quite than track direct KPIs for experiential marketing, you possibly can measure the success of an experiential campaign with indirect indicators like social media engagement, participant feedback, and foot traffic.
Advantages of experiential marketing
“Experiential marketing is all about bringing a brand to life, and today’s consumers are all about experiences,” says Naomi Ratner Oshry, director of business development and communications at experiential agency 3CS, which has worked with brands including Hulu, Sports Illustrated, and Disney+. “If firms do experiential marketing right, it could possibly be very impactful with a lot of unique advantages.”
Listed below are a couple of of those advantages:
Builds emotional connection
When an interaction resonates emotionally with a customer, they remember it. A winning experiential marketing strategy creates positive emotional ties between your brand and target market. This emotional bond together with your company can translate into increased brand loyalty. Loyal customers usually tend to make repeat purchases, organically share their experiences, and recommend your brand to family and friends.
“It’s a longer-term approach,” Naomi says. “Someone can have an incredible time at an experiential activationand not make an instantaneous purchase. Nevertheless, a 12 months later once they’re fascinated about buying X product, they’ll think back to your awesome hands-on experience at a music festival together with your company and buy with you.”
Creates memorable experiences
Today’s consumers like to share experiences on social media, especially when those experiences are surprising or delightful. Standout experiential marketing efforts can generate online buzz and free word-of-mouth marketing—pulling in an excellent wider audience’s attention.
All this may develop into user-generated content (UGC) to your content marketing strategy; consider photos of enthusiastic attendees at your event and videos of them having fun with the hands-on experience. Resharing UGC in your brand’s social media accounts can assist you to save on marketing expenses and construct trust with potential customers—organic, non-sponsored messaging feels authentic since it is.
Enables direct interaction
“Traditional avenues like banner ads or Instagram could be effective parts of a marketing strategy, but with those, there’s no interaction,” Naomi points out. “Today’s consumers value experiences and engagement.”
Successful experiential campaigns foster direct engagement between brands and customers through in-person events or virtual experiences. Use these interactions to learn more about your customers and get helpful insights into their preferences, product usage, and challenges. Constructing real customer relationships helps you to tailor yourmarketing strategy and maybe even adjust your product to raised meet needs.
Offers differentiation
Ecommerce markets are inclined to be highly competitive, and small businesses can struggle to face out. Experiential marketing strategies enable differentiation from competitors through unique, unforgettable experiences.
These on-brand experiences can create brand awareness by capturing the eye of potential future customers and setting you apart. So, when it comes time to purchase, yours is the corporate customers remember.
Experiential marketing examples
Red Bull Stratos: extreme livestream
Red Bull drew eyeballs and headlines worldwide for sponsoring a highly extreme event: Felix Baumgartner’s record-breaking skydive from the sting of space. The corporate livestreamed the dive, leveraging technology to create an exciting experience for viewers and a memorable global spectacle.
Barbie Selfie Generator: online AI personalization
The web site BarbieSelfie.ai invites users to upload a selfie and find themselves in Barbie’s world, slotting them into scenes next to Margot Robbie’s character singing in her iconic pink Corvette. This immersive, lighthearted campaign employs the novelty of AI to generate social-media-tailored content.
IKEA Sleepover: in-person shopping adventure
IKEA stores within the UK, the US, Canada, Sweden, and Australia invited contest-winning customers to spend the night in-store, sleeping in areas personalized to their interests. A routine shopping experience became an unforgettable overnight escapade at IKEA. The event showcased the brand’s ingenuity while inspiring winners to create their very own content and the media to cover the winners’ nighttime abodes.
Experiential marketing suggestions
When establishing your experiential marketing campaign, consider these best practices:
Determine your goals
An experiential strategy differs from traditional marketing because it might not result in immediate product sales. As a substitute, goals include getting your brand name in front of potential future customers, sharing free samples of a brand new product, driving social engagement, and increasing intangible assets like brand goodwill.
“Objectives can vary from client to client, but remember what’s most significant in experiential is bringing the brand to life for consumers,” Naomi says. “When consumers walk away, they need to have a deep understanding of what the brand stands for and feel that their experience was impactful.”
Set your approximate budget
The splashiest experiential marketing examples could also be high-budget events from big-name firms, but impactful experiences needn’t at all times be costly.
“You possibly can have a fantastic effect with a limited budget,” Naomi says. “It’s a matter of the creative process and determining what makes an activation successful for you. The suitable agency partner can think outside the box, suit your budget, and give you a plan to align together with your brand and objectives.”
Encourage audience participation
The goal with experiential marketing is to create a memorable experience—and passive spectating often isn’t exciting. Quite, tap into interactive experiences that engage the senses: scavenger hunts, taste tests, virtual experiences, contests for the very best user-generated content. By inviting your customers to participate, you’re transforming them from spectators into a part of a community doing something together.
Align the event with brand values
Any experiential campaign should align closely together with your brand identity and core values—like sustainability, social responsibility, ethical sourcing, and inclusivity. Today’s consumers want to grasp what a brand stands for, and so they expect authenticity and consistency across the experience. For instance, an environmentally minded company should offer product samples in biodegradable material, not single-use plastic.
Select a compatible agency partner
If you might have the budget to work with a marketing agency, write up a request for proposal (RFP), which is a document an organization issues when it’s trying to hire someone to perform a service. Your RFP should include your brand overview, what you hope to attain through an experiential marketing event, and your budget.
Send your RFP to experiential marketing or event agencies you’re fascinated about. Agencies can then submit responses detailing how they’d fulfill your request, sharing an summary of their ideas and approaches in a bid to win your corporation.
A terrific RFP response doesn’t necessarily mean the agency is fit. “Meet with agencies and find someone you vibe with, because personalities are essential on this work,” Naomi says. “An agency may provide great ideas, but in the event that they don’t feel like fit for a long-term relationship, it’d make sense to search out another person.”
Experiential marketing FAQ
Why is experiential marketing higher than traditional marketing?
Experiences can create emotional connections that engender brand loyalty. Additionally they encourage lively participation, may encourage user-generated content and word-of-mouth amplification, and may assist you to differentiate your brand from competitors.
What’s the most important problem with experiential marketing?
Unlike traditional marketing, which usually involves straightforward success metrics like click-through rates, experiential marketing KPIs could be less clear. The core goal is to create impactful experiences for long-term loyalty, which is difficult to quantify.
What are elements of successful experiential marketing campaigns?
Winning experiential marketing experiences leave customers with a deep understanding of your brand, lasting memories, and a positive association that may result in future sales.
