Unlike traditional marketing methods, experiential marketing relies on a brand manifesting authentic connections with their customers. Rather than focusing on advertisements and promotional strategies, experiential marketing works on creating a two-way marketing channel between the brand and the customer. An experiential marketing effort is one that is live, interactive, and focuses on the experience rather than an item or service.
Understanding experiential marketing is one thing, implementing an experiential marketing campaign is another. The world of experience marketing is tricky – these principles will help to successfully navigate the confusing landscape of experiential marketing.
- Define A Successful Outcome
Start the process of your experiential marketing campaign by defining what it is that you’d like to achieve with it. Sure, it sounds simple enough – but you’d be surprised to know that this is a step brands frequently miss. Taking the time to figure out what you’d like the outcome to be can manage expectations and help the campaign stay aligned with a goal.
- Understand Your Audience
Experiential marketing is all about creating meaningful connections with your audience. Plan an experience for your audience by considering what it is they would like and how your brand can deliver. Understanding your audience goes beyond what they expect from your brand.
Learn about what your customers care about, where they like to spend their time, what they appreciate about your brand and how your company can provide value to them. Addressing these questions will take you on your way to creating an experience that encourages emotional bonds with your most loyal customers. According to Polite event staff Melbourne, understanding your audience goes a long way towards assembling event staffing solutions that match the demands and expectations of attendees. Events that fail to recognise the importance of assigning the right personnel are more likely to fall short of the expectations of the event audience.
- Align With Brand Values
In the planning of experiential marketing strategies, it can be easy to get carried away with wild ideas and innovative plans. It’s important to keep your experiential marketing efforts in line with the core values of your brand and what your brand stands for.
If you stray too far from what is true to your brand, your marketing efforts will be for nothing – your consumers will fail to form that correlating connection between the experience and the company. As you brainstorm for experiential marketing ideas, use your brand’s authenticity as a guiding principle. Not only do you want to show those attending a good experience, but ideally, you’d like your brand’s core to shine through too.
- Make it Insta-worthy
There is no point in overlooking the Instagram or social media aspect of experiential marketing in 2020. Social media channels play an important role in the way people interact, engage, and organically share content.
When designing your experiential marketing campaign, consider integrating a digital aspect. Events naturally encourage Instagram posts and Facebook check-ins, but experiential marketers should take it a step further and consider how their marketing efforts will make for great photos and social media posts.
- Test Your Ideas
Once you’ve come up with a design for an experiential marketing campaign, set up a trial or test run. This will enable you to flag up any potential problems before getting your customers involved. Experiential marketing campaigns are tricky to manage and come with many potential problems. Prevent these problems from occurring by testing out the campaign on staff or friends before the big day. If your experience involves any technology, gadgets, or machinery, make sure you and your staff are entirely familiar with the tools in the lead up to the event.