The agency marketplace is a crowded one, with generalist and specialist agencies competing for brands’ often limited marketing budgets. While it’s true that considerable overlap exists among agencies’ services and benefits to clients, there are key differences, and a brand hoping to achieve success through a specific strategy would be wise to choose its agency accordingly. Experiential marketing, which includes brand activations, is one of those strategies. Read on for a summary of the wide world of brand activation companies, the services they provide, and how they help brands create brand activation strategies to propel them toward success.
What Is a Brand Activation?
A brand activation is an experience, event, or interaction that’s designed to generate brand awareness and engagement with the brand’s target audience. The deeper purpose behind brand activations is to forge a lasting emotional connection between a brand and its ideal customers. “By immersing consumers in a brand’s world, activations create an opportunities for meaningful engagement that can translate into long-term loyalty,” says customengineeredarts.com, which includes experiential marketing, sampling campaigns, in-store events, trade shows, and other experiential events and occasions under the umbrella term “brand activation.”
This immersion-to-connection transition is made by creating a singular experience participants carry with them long after the interaction ends. Brand activations are individual events or campaigns — not the same thing as overall, ongoing brand strategy — but what they lack in repetition they make up for in intensity. Brand activations are designed to forge connections between the brand and consumers through memorable, positive firsthand experiences that resonate with attendees emotionally. This is “high-touch, deep-connection” marketing, and pulling it off successfully requires a specialized combination of skills, experience, connections, and creative talent. Many brands find this combination at specialized brand activation agencies.
What Are Brand Activation Agencies?
Like other marketing agencies and firms, brand activation agencies work with clients to identify the right approach, locations, and activities for their events to create experiences that will resonate with audiences. Staffed by professionals with expertise in project management, logistics, data collection and analysis, event staffing, and market research, as well as creative aspects like concept creation, and photo and video asset development, brand activation companies understand the specific strategies it takes to engage customers and drive return on investment (ROI). Brand activation services include a combination of public-facing and behind-the-scenes work that combine to create powerful experiences for participants.
How Do Brand Activation Agencies Drive Engagement and ROI?
Brand activation agencies create impactful campaigns by focusing on customer engagement and measurable returns at every phase of the activation planning process. Planning provides a roadmap for success — which, for a brand activation, means ensuring that the activation builds brand awareness, inspires customer loyalty, and generates data the brand can use to shape future decisions. Here are some of the key steps brand activation companies take:
Defining Goals
Increasing brand awareness, boosting sales, generating leads, launching a new product, and building customer loyalty are common objectives for brand activations. Brand activation agencies help their clients dig deep to define objectives, helping them determine not only what they want to accomplish but also how to measure effectiveness.
Uncovering Deep Audience Insights
Where brand activations are concerned, determining the audience being targeted is critical because it informs all of the choices that follow: location, timing, marketing, messaging, and creative direction.
Brand activation agencies start by helping their clients understand who their current customers are through wide-ranging research. They design and run polls or surveys to identify customers’ tastes, pain points, and product preferences. They analyze online reviews and conduct interviews with loyal customers (as identified via sales records) to find out why they chose the brand. They use online listening to pull insights from social media, and they study website analytics to see which content customers are finding and using, how long they’re staying on the site, and other information that helps the agency (and therefore the brand) understand what customers are experiencing and thinking. Finally, brand activation agencies often create personas, fictional representations of audience members’ traits, demographics, and behaviors that help clients understand the consumers they’re trying to reach. These personas inform every future creative choice in the process.
Creating Immersive Experiences
Working from a well-developed sense of who the brand’s ideal customers are, the activation agency team brainstorms concepts that both align with both audience interests and reflect the brand’s identity. The agency’s copywriters, designers, and experiential marketing specialists will pay attention to not only products and brand identity but also sensory and emotional aspects of the experience, creating fresh, exciting ways to highlight the brand’s uniqueness. Engaging, memorable activations are immersive, offering participants an experience that’s both multi-sensory and interactive. An activation is an opportunity to tell the brand’s story as it relates to the target audience, and an activation agency will use every tool at its disposal.
Managing Logistics
With experiential marketing events like activations, the creative aspects of the event depend on logistical expertise to turn plans into reality. Brand activation agencies have a reputation as detail-oriented project managers who navigate local permitting requirements and negotiate favorable deals with vendors. That’s 100% accurate. It’s the logistics pros at brand activation agencies who are the experts at running the logistical, practical side of the house in ways that bring others’ creative vision to life. They work hand-in-hand with the rest of the agency’s creative team to ensure the creative vision goes off without a hitch, by navigating the maze of local requirements and managing myriad relationships with third-party vendors and suppliers.
Knowing the brand’s target audience and the goals and message for the activation, logistics specialists work with clients and creative pros to identify the right location for the event — one that has a high concentration of the intended audience — as well as the right venue, a spot that’s well suited to support the event via the right infrastructure and access.
Measuring ROI
Brand activations not only offer brands a chance to interact with consumers, they also produce a lot of data — meaning they’re an unparalleled means of learning more about your customers and how to connect with them. Brand activation agencies work with clients to create a plan for measuring results, which means building into the event opportunities to gather data to ensure every event produces valuable, actionable insights.
The means by which agencies gather data include the obvious and relatively low-tech, like keeping a headcount of participants, alongside progressively more complex tactics like the following:
- conducting surveys before, during, and after the event to gauge changes in awareness and perception
- building an event-specific landing page to direct consumers to before, during, and after the event
- creating unique QR codes and social media hashtags for the activation and related activities
- tracking local and national media coverage
- online “listening” to monitor increases in brand awareness
- deploying sophisticated technology for tracking attendees as they move through the activation
- using swag or product giveaways as an occasion for collecting attendees’ email and other contact information, or in exchange for completing short surveys or participating in interviews
Finally, the value of all of these efforts only increases for brands that have worked with the same agency before, because the agency has a means of comparison to better measure what worked against what didn’t in each activation. Over time, this gives the brand and its experiential activation agency opportunities to build on successes, optimizing the brand’s activations with each new event.
Supporting Future Marketing Efforts
Like any brand-sponsored event, an activation is an opportunity to capture fresh, exciting digital assets like photos, footage of interactions with consumers, behind-the-scenes video, and product photography. This creates content for social media channels, your brand’s website or blog, or long- or short-form video for a variety of other purposes, including promoting future events.
Collecting Data
Data collection helps the brand and its activation agency determine ROI for experiential marketing events, but its value goes beyond deciding whether your activation was worth the budget. Data collection is also the way you build an overall, more broadly applicable understanding of consumer behavior and what resonates most with your target audience.
Brand activation companies collect data on consumers across the entire customer journey to ascertain what works for your brand and what falls short. The same behavior tracking tech that monitors attendee behavior in your activation space can be used to uncover insights about how customers move through your retail stores, for example. The online listening that helped plan and evaluate the activation can be applied to find and analyze customer reviews to understand brand perception and observe shifts in awareness over time. Monitoring online behavior can help you understand how customers are using your website and what guides their purchasing decisions.
Building Strategic Social Media Partnerships
Leveraging social media channels to promote your brand activation is always a smart move, but there’s a way to level up that leverage that can take the brand’s social media presence, activation, and consumer awareness of your brand to new heights: strategic partnership with influencers and brand ambassadors. Connecting and partnering with these social media experts amplifies your brand’s reach and credibility and can even create cross-promotional opportunities with other brands.
Once you and your activation agency partners have identified objectives for the activation, their social media team can advise you in choosing which social media channels to focus energy on. From there, the agency can work with you to assess relevant content across those channels to find influencers in your industry. Working from a list of five to ten creators, the agency will dig in more closely to find the best fits for your brand’s identity, personality, and audience. While ultimately the choice to enter a collaborative relationship with an influencer belongs to the brand owner, the agency can help every step of the way, from developing that initial pool of applicants to managing the relationship and coordinating the influencer’s involvement in the activation.
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