fbpx

Leaving A Positive Impact On Consumers: Why Brands Need An Experiential Marketing Budget

Experiential Marketing

The race to attract eyeballs on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok has resulted in a digital space that is too crowded, creating a genuine cause for concern for companies using social media as their core marketing channel. 

With the over-saturation in the digital space, your company needs to make a shift: in 2023, in order to keep up with consumer trends, convert high ROIs, and leave a lasting, positive impact on consumer behavior, your company needs a sizable experiential marketing budget. 

Experiential marketing through brand activations like pop-up shops, mobile marketing tours, showrooms, and sampling events are shown to leave a lasting, positive impact on consumers. In this blog, we’ll dive into the details of why an experiential marketing budget is right for you.

Loungefly's Polka Dot Pop-Up

Where Digital Marketing Efforts Fail

Before outlining the benefits of in-person experiential marketing, it’s worth taking a look at the pitfalls of digital marketing efforts. Here are some quick stats that paint the picture: 

Now more than ever, your consumers are attuned to what an ad looks like and what it wants to sell them, and that drives them away.

The Positive Impact of Experiential Marketing on Consumers

On the flip side, experiential marketing has been a significant predictor of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. While marketers have been led to believe that social media may be the best way to communicate with their target audience, face-to-face, experience-based marketing has proven to be more effective. Yes, that goes even for Gen Z.  

  • 40% of consumers said they felt more brand loyalty after participating in a brand experience or interaction.
  • 91% of consumers that were targeted via experiential marketing were more likely to purchase the product or service. 
  • Marketers who have incorporated experiential marketing report a 56% increase in leads. 
  • 47% of brands report an ROI of between 3:1 And 5:1 via brand activations. 

Successful Experiential Marketing By Small, Mid-Size, and Large Brands

The size of experiential marketing budgets vary across companies; however, brand activations can be done at any level, in any industry, and with any budget. Here are a few examples of different companies that were able to implement experiential marketing in different ways! 

#FollowMyScent to Costa Brazil

Costa Brazil is a new, up-and-coming beauty line. To announce the opening of their Soho store, the brand strategically placed a marketing vehicle on the corner that offered New Yorkers a free spray of their fragrance and complimentary coffee. More importantly, guests were offered a bounce-back card that led them to the in-store pop-up just a few yards away, using the #FollowMyScent tagline. 

The pop-up café, was a nice touch to a more dynamic pop-up happening in-store, getting consumers excited about a new scent in New York. 

The pop-up café, as well as the sidewalk graffiti, was a nice touch to a more dynamic pop-up happening in-store, ultimately getting consumers excited about a new scent in New York. 

Tea on Tia Campaign

Tia celebrated the grand opening of their office in Santa Monica with their aptly named “Tea on Tia” campaign, a pop-up cafe that hit Santa Monica, Playa Vista, and Brentwood to treat women to complimentary matcha latté from Sachi.LA, learn more about Tia’s innovative care model, and take home a Tia tote bag.

This experiential marketing activation gave potential patients a new, more personal perspective on the health network with a face-to-face experience that inspired trust between the brand and consumers. 

Laneige Water Bank Hydration School

To promote two of their products, their Water Bank Hydration Collection and the Lip Sleeping Mask, Laneige transformed a double-decker bus into a dynamic beauty pop-up experience, treating guests to an educational product sampling, prizes, and photo-ops. Each of these elements seamed together to successfully spread brand awareness and drive up sales in NYC! 

Wrap Up

Regardless of your company size or industry, experiential marketing is a go-to strategy in 2023. While other companies double-down on digital marketing efforts, you can be the brand that stands and better appeals to consumers’ emotions with in-person brand activations. 

Feeling inspired? Reach out to our team today! We can help create memorable pop-ups, showrooms, guerrilla marketing campaigns, and more with an experiential marketing budget that is right for you.

Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin
Share on email
MORE POSTS
FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM

Tap Into A New Generation Of Consumers With College Brand Activations

Experiential Marketing

As a brand, reaching a younger demographic can be challenging; especially when it comes to Gen Z, it feels like the trends are always changing, and just like that, what was ‘in’ yesterday is ‘out’ today. 

While marketing your brand to this age range can be tricky, there’s no understating how crucial this line of communication ultimately is: Gen Z is the new generation of consumers and the people who shape so much of our culture, thereby playing a considerable role in the success– or decline– of your business. 

The fact of this may seem intimidating, but here’s the good news: in the same quest to tap into this demo, many companies have already discovered that the best way to communicate with Gen Z is through brand activations on (or around) college campuses. 

In the world of marketing, an overwhelming consensus has been reached: Gen Z craves experiential marketing. Now it’s up to you to leverage this discovery to your business’s advantage. 

In this blog, we will go into greater depth about why, exactly, experiential marketing and in-person brand activations resonate so well with this target audience, especially when they take place on college towns and campuses. We’ll also highlight different college marketing examples that have truly connected with this new generation of consumers. 

By doing both, our hope is that you leave feeling inspired to create face-to-face, experiential marketing activations of your own. Let’s get started.

University of Wisconsin Bascom Hill

Why College Marketing Is A Smart Move For Your Brand

Experiential marketing is an effective marketing strategy to implement across all industries and for a wide range of demographics— with that being said, face-to-face, experience-based marketing is especially effective when your goal is to grab the attention of college students. 

People in their late teens and early twenties tend to be more open-minded and malleable, making them the perfect group of consumers to get on your brand’s side. And, where better to find college students than around college campuses? 

Because people of this age group tend to embrace new brands and experiences, it’s during these four years of college when so many of us form our opinions and perceptions of the world. So, if you’re able to resonate with this audience during these informative years, you’re positioning yourself for a very successful future. 

Experiential Marketing Over Social Media Marketing? Really, Why?

Does the fact that college students favor in-person brand activations to hefty social media campaigns feel counterintuitive? You’re not alone. Over recent years, many marketing departments have made the same mistake under the same assumption that because Gen Z grows up around the Internet and social media, digital marketing is the best way to connect with them. 

However, what has resulted from this collective shift to social media marketing is an extreme saturation in the digital space. Look through your own lens: when was the last time you were happy to be interrupted from a video or feed by an ad? 

Gen Z is online the most, and this has two complex implications: you want to have an online presence where so many eyeballs are, but you don’t want to bombard them with obvious and overdone selling tactics. Experiential marketing can walk the tight-rope, and here’s why:

Experiential marketing isn’t the antithesis of social media marketing. In fact, what brand activations, pop-ups, mobile tours, lounges, and other immersive brand experiences do so well is that they create moments that are as fun to share online as they are to enjoy ‘IRL.’

Gen-Z and Millennials love events and experiences that they can capture content from and show off on their social media platforms, so brand activations on college campuses give you organic exposure online that goes way further than overtly promotional content. 

College Brand Activations That Made A Lasting Statement

Now that we’ve laid out the benefits of experiential marketing and college brand activations, here are a few instances of college marketing that forged lasting connections with consumers. When thinking about your own marketing ideas, feel free to draw inspo from these success stories! 

Bondi Sands "Tan Van"

Bondi Sands is an Australian beauty brand that captures the light and breezy Aussie lifestyle in their everyday products. To drive greater awareness around their 1 Hour Self-Tanning Foam in a college-aged demographic, the brand produced a food truck experience known as the ‘Tan Van’ on the corner of West Fourth St and Broadway, strategically near New York University. 

The branded experience was straight-forward, creative, and interpersonal: qualities that Gen Z values. On their way to class, NYU students had their attention caught by a branded food truck that read “Free Self Tan and Coffee,” and once they were intrigued, a friendly Bondi Sands brand ambassador would greet them, guide them to scan the QR code, sign up for the loyalty program to receive their free sample bottle and application mitt to take home. 

This quick-and-easy college brand activation was the perfect way to leave a brand impression as lasting as the tan on this target audience. 

Gerry's Partisan Pizza Tour

RepresentUS used a similar marketing tactic to accomplish their own goals. A non-profit, non-partisan organization, RepresentUS wanted to create an educational experience around the unjust practice of gerrymandering that could be enjoyed by college students, a demographic that is forming its own opinions and feelings towards the government in real-time.

This is how The Gerry’s Partisan Pizza mobile tour was born. The concept of this multi-city marketing campaign was to make the concept of gerrymandering better understood through a visual (and edible) representation. To do this, RepresentUS drove a branded food truck to different college towns across the country and educated people about the importance of fairly segmented voting districts with pizza that was unevenly cut. The idea was to make the pizza an educational snack that bolstered the keynote speakers’ message and overall branding of the truck.

Schmooze

For a brand like Schmooze, college marketing is a no-brainer. Schmooze is a dating app that’s motto is to “swipe memes, not people.” Unlike other dating sites, the idea behind Schmooze is to connect people based on their sense of humor rather than looks. 

As you can imagine, the main target audience for this app are young, single people in their teens and twenties. So, where better to get people using their app than on college campuses? They took this experiential cart to different schools in the northeast, including MIT, Northeastern, Harvard, and Boston University to communicate the benefits of their app and gain users in real-time. 

Alpha Foods College Sampling Tour

Last but not least, there’s Alpha Foods. Alpha Foods is a plant-based food line that was looking to communicate a message core to their brand: being a vegan or vegetarian can be delicious when you eat Alpha Foods. What the brand came up with was a product sampling tour that stopped in different college campuses, where the highest concentration of their target audience was (young consumers open to a new way of eating).

They fully customized a food truck and turned it into a product sampling food truck pop-up to create buzz around the brand’s delicious vegan options, visiting seven different college campuses across Los Angeles and New York including NYU, Cornell, Columbia, FIT, Fordham, USC and UCLA. 

This experiential marketing tactic turned out to be the perfect way to get people on board with Alpha Foods’s revolutionary and conscientious way of eating. 

Wrap Up

If you’re looking for marketing ideas to help you connect with a younger demographic, college marketing should be at the very top of your list. Brand activations allow you to take your brand directly to college campuses, where you are able to piggyback off exciting events within the community like college football, date parties, March Madness, and career fairs— or create excitement of your own. 

College campuses are where so many people form lasting beliefs and connections, which why it’s important for brands to make a concentrated effort to make your presence known in this environment. So while connecting with Gen Z may feel impossible, brand activations offer the perfect solution! 

Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin
Share on email
MORE POSTS
FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM

How Your Brand Can Win With OOH Super Bowl Marketing Stunts

Experiential Marketing

Hundreds of millions of people tune into the Super Bowl every year, making the NFL championship the single-most watched sporting event in the country. Because the game attracts such a large audience, many brands fall into the same annual marketing trap: paying exorbitant prices for a Super Bowl commercial spot without the intended ROI. 

In this blog, we will discuss how you can outsmart other brands by opting out of Super Bowl commercials and instead implementing OOH Super Bowl marketing stunts that truly stick with your target audience. Let’s get started.

The Case Against Super Bowl Ads

Again, with so many eyes glued to the TV for the big game, Super Bowl commercials have become a high priority for brands looking to leverage the hype for their own interests, whether that be launching a new product or just driving more general brand awareness.

To paint a picture of the demand, in 2022, a Super Bowl ad came with the hefty price tag of $6.5 million for just a 30-second slot; that’s right— brands were out more than $200,000 for every one second of engagement with consumers.

The problem with this hyper-focus on Super Bowl commercials is two-fold: one, these ads are only an option for big brands, and two, no matter your budget, they’re simply not worth it. So many brands continue opting into a TV spot (at the expense of a more comprehensive marketing strategy) without considering the data at hand. Take these three simple facts for starters:   

  1. Since 2015, Super Bowl TV audiences have been on the decline.
  2. As of 1967, the cost of a thirty-second ad has increased 20-fold, while total viewing has less than doubled.
  3. Only 10% of consumers remember the average Super Bowl ad and know the brand being advertised.

Given that information, you definitely want to reconsider this year’s Super Bowl marketing campaign— but do keep in mind that just because you may sit out of this year’s rat race for a TV spot doesn’t mean that you can’t still leverage the nationwide attention on the Super Bowl to your company’s advantage. 

Here’s how you can manage a more effective marketing strategy around Super Bowl Sunday in any market. 

The Better Route: OOH Super Bowl Marketing Stunts

As the name suggests, out-of-home (OOH) advertising is any form of advertising that takes place outside of consumers’ homes. Using OOH Super Bowl marketing stunts, you can reach your audience for a fraction of the price and gain a significantly higher ROI than with a traditional Super Bowl ad. 

For perspective, for every $1 spent, OOH delivers approximately $2.80 in sales, compared to $2.43 for TV and $2.41 for print. And, it’s worth knowing that 80% of Super Bowl commercials fail to change consumer opinions/intentions regarding a brand.

Whether you’re a small business or a household name, OOH Super Bowl marketing stunts put you in the best position to drive growth and create meaningful relationships with your consumers because you reach your target audience in unexpected, unconventional, and more memorable ways. 

Now you may be wondering, what do OOH Super Bowl marketing stunts actually look like? 

The Dietz & Watson Bird Dog Truck

Take Dietz & Watson‘s mobile tour as the perfect example. During this year’s NFL playoff season, the brand showed its love for the Philadelphia Eagles by feeding their rowdy hometown fans ‘Bird Dogs’: delicious Dietz & Watson beef franks topped with chopped long hots, provolone, and crunchy fried onions served in an Eagles green bun.

After making its big debut at Drexel University, the Dietz & Watson Bird Dog truck went on to feed fanatics in different locations all over Philly— The Comcast Center Campus, Big Nicks Deli, Acme Grocery Store, The Lincoln Financial Field and Rittenhouse Square— as the Eagles kept their winning streak. 

Now that the Eagles having finally advanced into the Super Bowl, this OOH marketing campaign will have more in store until the big game on February 12th. From a business perspective, what’s important to note is that Dietz & Watson was able to associate their brand name with the Eagles during an extremely optimal time. 

Of all football fans, Eagles Fanatics are some of the liveliest, which means that they are the perfect fanbase for Dietz & Watson to target around Super Bowl season with an out-of-box, OOH Super Bowl stunt that is sure to leave the impression of a lifetime on Philadelphians. 

Final Thoughts Before Kickoff

With Super Bowl Sunday just around the corner, it’s not too late to put on a guerrilla marketing campaign that leverages the hype around the game to drive business growth. Like Dietz & Watson, your brand can opt out of this year’s Super Bowl ads without sitting out on the marketing opportunity entirely. 

One thing’s for sure: if you’re looking for cost-effective and worthwhile ways to market your brand on the Super Bowl, OOH marketing is the way to go. 

Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin
Share on email
MORE POSTS
FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM

Why Your Brand Should Use Glass Box Trucks And Mobile Billboards For Marketing

Experiential Marketing

What Are Glass Box Trucks?

Glass box trucks are different from other marketing vehicles because the interior of the vehicle is completely open and transparent through its full-length windows. This feature is notable because it gives your brand greater opportunity for interior customization and catches people’s attentions right away; perhaps better than any other experiential marketing vehicle, glass box trucks can help you boost brand awareness in multiple markets and leave a lasting impact on your target audience.

Learn more about the marketing benefit of glass box trucks and mobile billboards below! 

Benefits of Marketing with Glass Box Trucks and Mobile Billboards

  • Visibility

Again, the most distinguishable feature of the glass truck is its visibility. The value of this vehicle’s huge glass windows is that consumers get a clear view into your brand right away. If you’ve decked out the interior of the truck to be a showroom for your new collection, someone can easily see this from just walking by! 

  • Travel

The glass box truck is also very transportable. Unlike food carts or tuk tuks, this experiential vehicle can be taken on mobile marketing tours that typically have a greater reach than a marketing activation in only one location.

  • Interior Design

Because of the openness, your glass truck is a true blank canvas that can be fully customized on the inside. Many brands use the inside of a glass truck as a pop-up or mobile showroom, turning this vehicle into a multi-dimensional store experience. 

  • Organic social media growth

Experiential marketing with a glass truck drives social media growth. Especially if you partner with an influencer to attend and promote your brand activation, you can create meaningful brand exposure online.

  • Direct interaction with consumers 

The benefit to experiential marketing vehicles at large is that they provide a true way to connect with consumers. In a world where there is so much focus on digital marketing, you can stand out from your business competitors with a unique in-person initiative.

Now that you’ve learned the benefits of marketing your brand with a glass truck, let’s look at real life examples of brands who have used these vehicles. Here are three well-known brands that have driven business growth with glass box trucks! 

Household Names That Have Used Glass Box Trucks For Marketing

Zara

Zara appeared at Pride 2019 knowing that this popular, once-a-year New York City event was the ultimate location for Zara to not only show support for the LGBTQ+ community, but also to market their brand to a powerful demographic. 

Zara accomplished this with the idea to build out a JUST Water rainbow display from inside a glass truck! The unique window display proved to be the perfect way to fit the spirit of the event while creating larger brand awareness both in-person and on social media. Plus, it’s hard to go wrong when you’re handing out free water to New Yorkers in the summer heat!  

Bacardi

The centerpiece of Bacardi’s larger ‘Winter Summerland’ campaign was the mobile showroom that made stops in different New York hotspots, most notably of which was Times Square. 

The interior of Bacardi’s glass truck was stocked with merch and other goodies for guests to peruse, and ultimately, the mobile showroom left an impression on consumers during the Holiday season, an extremely important time of the year for brands to stand out. 

Loungefly

Loungefly transformed a glass truck into a polka dot pop-up that celebrated their polka dot collection on the same weekend as National Polka Dot Day! Aside from the eye-catching exterior, the glass truck gave passerbyers clear view into the interior of the truck’s collection display, which was ultimately the focal point of the promotion.

 Inside the truck, guests had could enjoy a photo booth moment and free tea as they looked through the Disney collection, plus they had the chance to purchase items on the store as well as win discounts! All of these features sewn together shows how much you can accomplish via these vehicles. 

Key Takeaways

  • Glass trucks are a type of experiential marketing vehicle that are characterized by their full-length windows.
  • When used for brand activations and marketing campaigns, glass trucks are effective at creating lasting consumer impressions. 
  • Many big brand names have used this kind of marketing because there is value to the dynamic in-person experiences that glass box trucks can provide, such as mobile pop-ups, mobile billboards, and mobile showrooms.
Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin
Share on email
MORE POSTS
FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM

Experiential Marketing Strategies For Small Businesses

Experiential Marketing

Why should small businesses adopt experiential marketing strategies?

Needless to say, small businesses don’t have the marketing budgets to compete with more established companies. This fact poses an obvious challenge for lesser-known brands: how do you create name recognition and drive business growth without breaking the bank? 

One answer is experiential marketing. Experiential marketing has grown in popularity over the last few years, with some of the most prominent brands adopting this approach to reach their goals. But don’t let the fact that Laneige or Red Bull have turned to experiential marketing stray you away; this is also the perfect marketing strategy for small businesses.

Here are two main reasons why:

It leaves a powerful impression on consumers.

Experiential marketing is hands-on, so it is guaranteed to leave a powerful impression on consumers— and when you’re up-and-coming, what is more valuable than a powerful impression?

When you don’t have the budget to run campaigns year-round, you want to hone in on the strategy you think will be the most effective, prioritizing quality over quantity. In more recent years, this has proven to be pop-up shops, mobile tours, and other face-to-face marketing tactics that fall under the umbrella of experiential marketing.

Think about it, what stands out more to the average person in your customer base: one of fifty advertisements you scroll past on Instagram in one sitting or a unique pop-up event in a key market? Especially when so much of daily life can be experienced behind a screen, in-person marketing is more influential and cutting-edge than ever.

This is your chance to be the brand that truly connects. 

It gives you the bang for your buck, no matter the budget.

When you have so much at stake as a small business, so you don’t want to risk spending your resources on a marketing strategy that is ineffective or doesn’t bring a significant ROI. You also want to make sure that whatever initiative you do take on communicates what your brand is all about in the long-term. Thankfully, all of this can be accomplished through experiential marketing. 

The most critical piece to experiential marketing for small businesses is that these campaigns and activations are extremely customizable, which means you can operate within whatever budget restraints you may have. The scope, and therefore the cost, is all up to you. 

3 experiential marketing strategies for small businesses.

Now, you may be wondering what experiential marketing actually looks like for smaller brands. Here are three examples to illustrate what you can accomplish once you opt out of traditional marketing and turn to out-of-the-box brand experiences.

1. Open a mobile dining experience for your brand launch.

Follow La Bamba’s lead and create a mobile café to launch your new brand. 

This swimwear line celebrated its launch in Soho and the Meatpacking District, handing out free donuts with flavors that matched the creative concepts of three bathing suits from the collection.

Over the course of the weekend, La Bamba was able to hand out 1,000 donuts while simultaneously gaining 1,000 newsletter subscriptions.

The promotion was the perfect kick-off for the brand, giving consumers the opportunity to get an idea of La Bamba’s aesthetic at just a glance of their branded truck, as well as the chance to dive in deeper, interacting first-hand with brand ambassadors who put a face to the La Bamba name.

La Bamba branded food truck
La Bamba launch from branded food truck

2. Put on a product sampling experience at events and festivals.

Product sampling is one sure way to win consumers over because it accomplishes what other forms of marketing can’t: it gets your product into consumers’ hands in real time.

Regardless of how funny the commercial or how big the billboard, consumers can’t know if they actually like product via those mediums; alternatively, product sampling is the perfect way to create a meaningful appreciation for your brand. 

Shaka Tea used this experiential marketing strategy over a mobile tour, hitting four key cities: Miami, Denver, Austin, and Charlotte. The brand hit pride festivals, sporting events, concerts, and popular bars to get their tea in the hands of as many consumers as possible! 

Shaka Tea branded truck in Denver
Shaka Tea mobile tour

3. Produce a pop up in a key market, like New York City.

Costa Brazil is an up-and-coming self-care and fragrance brand. Before the official opening, the brand turned their soon-to-be-store into a dynamic pop up experience. 

This experience included a branded cart on their street corner that offered complimentary coffee, bounce-back cards, and a quick perfume sample that ultimately encouraged people in-store for an even more immersive experience. Consumers took their coffee to-go and headed inside, where they were greeted by brand ambassadors with a special Costa Brazil bracelet, more extensive product samples, and even an opportunity for a massage!  

Costa Brazil coffee cart
Costa Brazil coffee pop up
Costa Brazil pop up in NYC

Final notes.

Few feats are as challenging as starting and running a successful business. An integral part of business growth is integrating the right marketing strategies. Especially when you’re just starting out or lesser-known, experiential marketing can be a really useful marketing approach to put yourself on the map. 

Experiential marketing for small businesses can mean showrooms, pop ups, product sampling events, mobile tours, and so much more. The most exciting part about this strategy is that it’s totally customizable, so you can deliver a brand experience that is both affordable and representative of what your brand is all about. 

Share on facebook
Share on twitter
Share on linkedin
Share on email
MORE POSTS
FOLLOW US ON INSTAGRAM