These days, traditional marketing strategies just don’t cut it. With common advertising techniques yielding suboptimal results, it’s clear younger demographics aren’t as receptive to the strategies of yesteryear. Print, radio, and even television marketing have consistently declined in R.O.I, and social media advertising has grown to the point of over-saturation.

That’s why you need to adjust the methods you use to reach potential customers. The best way to do this is by developing an experiential marketing strategy. Experiential marketing is a cutting-edge guerrilla marketing tactic, designed to engage consumers and form a long-term emotional bond with your brand.

What is experiential marketing?

Experiential marketing, also known as engagement marketing, is a strategy that utilizes direct contact with a customer as a means to establish a strong connection between that customer and your brand. This contact acts as a way for the consumer to experience how their life could benefit from your product or service, and encourages organic growth of brand-awareness.

The way this growth comes about is by providing an experience so engaging, the customer wants to share it with other people (either in-person or via social media). In this way, you get far more bang for your buck than with traditional marketing. If you can have someone associate positive feelings with your brand, to the point where they feel compelled to tell others, that effect will multiply and result in further brand activations.

HOW IS AN EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING STRATEGY EFFECTIVE?

Experiential marketing allows customers to see the human element behind a product or business. This has shown to be quite effective in fostering an emotional connection with a brand, and these tend to outlast the more shallow connections formed through traditional advertising. A smiling face, sincere enthusiasm, and real physical interaction with a product can all make a huge difference in creating long term, loyal patronage.

The way you go about designing this brand experience depends entirely on what your product or service is, how you want to be seen by the public, and what your activation goals are. While the possibilities are endless, there are a few tried-and-true experiential marketing strategies you can use as the foundation for your campaign.

Different types of experiential marketing strategies

There is a wide range of different avenues to explore when developing your experiential marketing strategy. Here are several different types of strategies, and how they can function to boost brand activations.

Pop-up shop: The most commonly-known form of experiential marketing, a pop-up shop allows you to market your brand while also making a small amount of sales. A purchase can be a powerful way to connect with a consumer, as this allows them to take a piece of your brand home with them. One drawback to this method is that while most consumers are willing to participate in a free event, some may not be interested in spending money right there and then.

Branded Mobile Tour: A branded mobile tour involves the use of a vehicle, bearing a visual representation of your brand, traveling to areas and allowing potential consumers to engage in a tailor-made brand experience. A secondary benefit of this tactic is the passive advertisement resulting from your branded vehicle. Your brand vehicle should include links to social media or more information about stops in the tour, so you can increase the foot traffic once you stop and set up.

Brand Booth: Often seen at conventions and fairgrounds, a brand booth should function as a microcosm of your entire brand image. Think of this as a more focused version of your mobile tour; since you will only be setting up in one location, you can really go all out on the brand experience. The best brand ambassadors, the cleanest product demo, and a slick social media tie-in are all the building blocks for a successful brand booth.

How do I develop a winning experiential marketing strategy?

The way you develop your experiential marketing strategy relies heavily on the image of your brand. You need to fully understand who your customer base is and what they want. Designing an experience that plays to these desires can help foster the emotional connection you are shooting for. You want a potential consumer to experience how their life could benefit from a relationship with your brand.

Let’s take one of the above methods, and apply it to a fictional coffee brand to see how it would function.

STRATEGY EXAMPLE: COFFEE BRAND

If your coffee brand is looking to create an experiential marketing strategy, a good choice would be to create a pop-up café.

As a lower-cost item, coffee is an easier sell than a piece of technology or clothing. While a high-end fashion company may benefit from a brand booth, most customers are willing to shell out a few dollars to try a new brand of coffee. Allowing a customer to smell and taste the product in a coffee shop type setting will create that positive experience you are aiming for.

Having a temporary storefront, with eye-catching visual branding drawing people in, is a great way to get your product into the hands of potential long-term customers. Then, when the pop-up shop is gone, this customer will naturally look for your brand in stores to recreate those feelings of positivity.

This is just one of a nearly infinite number of possibilities for combining your unique brand with a complimentary experiential marketing method. The ability to tailor the brand experience you provide to consumers is the largest benefit of developing an experiential marketing strategy. That, and many other reasons, are why it should be a primary technique in your marketing campaign playbook.

Experiential Marketing with FTP

One of the major reasons experiential marketing is so effective is because these kinds of face-to-face campaigns are completely customizable. If you’ve never developed your own brand activation concept, don’t worry. Our team can help you brainstorm an experiential marketing campaign that is tailored wholly to you, considering your desired target audience, budget, market, and other preferences you may have.

Learn more about our experiential marketing agency and contact us today to get started.

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In today’s fast-moving world, you need a multi-dimensional marketing strategy that can engage the tastes of modern consumers. While traditional media marketing still has its functions, it pays to stay on the cutting edge when developing a new campaign. Taking the time to invest in a proper experiential marketing strategy can yield an excellent return on investment, and help boost your brand’s name recognition and organic growth.

What is Experiential Marketing?

Experiential marketing is a marketing strategy method that involves direct communication and interaction with potential consumers, allowing them to engage with your brand’s product or service first-hand. This creates the opportunity for potential customers to form a personal connection with your brand, and foster a positive association through the experience you have designed. Having an experiential marketing strategy is vital to engage younger demographics, where consumers are far more likely to ignore traditional advertising methods.

But there isn’t just one style of campaign when it comes to experiential marketing. The composition of your particular experiential marketing strategy will help differentiate your brand from your competitors. Make sure to carefully choose what type you move forward with, and which style will work best for your unique brand.

How do you use Experiential Marketing in a campaign?

Developing your experiential marketing strategy starts with selecting what sort of experience you want to give consumers. The goal is to create a 3-dimensional engagement that allows potential customers to actively participate, as opposed to the 2-D interaction involved in a traditional piece of media marketing.

Brand Booth

Setting up a brand booth is a great way to show potential consumers who your brand is, and the benefits you offer. Choosing a high-traffic event like a convention, fair, or any other populated gathering, allows you to get a higher level of experiential activations. Once you have your location selected, make sure to design an experience that lets people see the unique benefits associated with choosing your brand over others in your industry. It’s also vital to select proper brand ambassadors to run your brand booth. Brand ambassadors are the staff members you have chosen to show your product or service. They will be wearing your logo, talking about your products, and in essence, representing your brand. Make sure they are friendly, knowledgeable, and aesthetically in-line with how you wish to present your brand to potential consumers.

Mobile Tours

Mobile tours combine the advantages of a brand booth with the addition of serving as essentially a moving billboard. A mobile tour involves having a branded vehicle travel through areas populated by your key demographic, making stops in hand-picked areas to engage with consumers.

An essential component of this experiential market strategy is to make sure you do significant research into where your key demographic resides. You want your brand vehicle to be moving through population zones where you have the highest chance of being seen by potential consumers. The same goes for each stop in the tour; though not as focused as when using a brand booth, each stop should be somewhere guaranteed to produce valuable activations and connections.

Virtual Showcase

If you design it properly, a virtual showcase can achieve the same level of customer engagement as an in-person event. If your product or service exists in the digital space, this is all the easier. Allowing a consumer to utilize a free version of the product, with possible guidance by an experienced ambassador, can achieve similar emotional connections to a brand booth or mobile tour. While this isn’t as efficient as a physical event, many of the same principles that work with any other experiential marketing strategy still apply.

Can I integrate my digital marketing strategies into these methods?

Digital and experiential marketing strategies can be successfully integrated to boost the effectiveness of any of these methods. Any type of experiential marketing strategy can benefit in the visibility added when you involve influencers relevant to your industry. For example: If you are an exercise related brand, find a fitness influencer on instagram to become involved in promoting your virtual showcase or mobile tour, or even participate directly in your brand booth.

You also want to make sure to digitally telegraph the location of your brand booth, any stops in your tour, or the release date of a virtual showcase, depending on which method you choose. Creating searchable events on social media increases the odds that those who show up will be directly interested in your service or product, and reduce the amount of time wasted on participants who are less likely to connect with your brand.

Who does Experiential Marketing work best for?

Experiential marketing works best for brand’s whose product or service benefits from hands-on use, and the guidance of a brand ambassador. So, for example, if you have a physical product like a food or beverage, your brand would benefit greatly from utilizing an experiential marketing method. Brand ambassadors could pass out small samples, and give those trying your product a colorful presentation about what ingredients your brand uses, and where they’re sourced.

Experiential marketing strategies are also advantageous for those who want to make lasting activations. Experiential marketing activations can form longer lasting emotional bonds between the consumer and your brand. But what exactly are these activations?

What is Experiential Marketing Anyway?

Experiential marketing activations are characterized by the level of brand recognition you receive from your experiential marketing strategy. So for every person that interacts with the brand experience you have designed, an activation would represent someone who connected personally with that experience. The more of these activations, the higher chance of conversion, and the greater increase in long term brand awareness and adoption.

Why experiential marketing works

The efficacy of traditional marketing has declined with younger generations for some time now. Millennials and Gen Z are willing to pay extra money just to avoid watching advertisements, and streaming companies have built revenue streams entirely on the elimination of traditional ads. That’s the reason many marketing companies are beginning to research how direct interaction connects with these demographics, and they’re seeing a much higher rate of success.

When a consumer gets to interact with a brand and product directly, a more genuine connection can be formed. Traditional marketing can be a little bloodless: the modern customer is aware that an ad is there simply to get you to buy. When someone interacts with a real person who is offering not only a free experience, but is available to answer any questions they may have, it humanizes your brand. Because at the end of the day, brands are made up of real people; experiential marketing makes it easier for the consumer to understand that, and connect with those people on a genuine level.

Tag: Experiential Marketing Strategy

How to Develop an Experiential Marketing Strategy That Wins

What is experiential marketing?

HOW IS AN EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING STRATEGY EFFECTIVE?

Different types of experiential marketing strategies

How do I develop a winning experiential marketing strategy?

STRATEGY EXAMPLE: COFFEE BRAND