Brand activations are a popular means of connecting with consumers for the simple reason that they work. According to recent studies, more than 90% of consumers say they’d be more likely to buy a brand’s product or service after attending an activation or other experience; 40% of those who have say the experience made them feel more loyal to the brand.
But the success of brand activations as a concept doesn’t guarantee success for a specific activation. Pulling off a successful brand activation takes planning, time, and resources and the expertise to apply them successfully — and that’s simply beyond the capabilities and scope of many brands and their busy owners.
Enter brand activation services companies. These are specialized agencies that excel at creating events that resonate with customers and deliver tangible results by focusing on direct, interactive, and memorable experiences.
What Are Brand Activation Services?
Following are some common services provided by brand activation companies as part of activation planning and execution, with the chief benefits for each.
Personas
The Service: Personas are essentially fictional personalities that represent different characteristics and traits of your brand’s ideal customer — a snapshot, in a sense, of the type of consumer you’re trying to reach. Experiential marketing consultants and agencies work with brands to develop these personas as they’re planning events.
The Benefit: Well-crafted personas help you provide a targeted experience to your ideal consumers by allowing you to tailor messaging, activities, and other aspects of the experience to their wants, needs, and tastes. Personas help you understand your customers the way you might understand a recent acquaintance or new friend, and this enables you and your agency to design an experience that better connects with them.
Experiential Marketing Vehicles
The Service: Food trucks, RVs, glass box trucks: Branded vehicles are a popular choice for activations, pop-up shops, and other experiential marketing events. Brand activation agencies handle customizing the trucks (it’s a custom-printed vinyl wrap, typically) and can help staff and train a street team to attract participants and get them engaged.
The Benefit: Branded vehicles are not only mobile, they’re relatively low cost — which means your brand can go just about anywhere your target audience congregates: beaches, entertainment districts, college campuses.
Sponsorships
The Service: Sponsoring a sporting event, running race, or festival is a great way to put your brand out there. But don’t stop with getting your logo on a program or banner. Holding a brand activation at the event itself can be a powerful springboard for brand awareness — even more so if the activation is aligned with the event’s theme, message, and purpose.
The Benefit: Sponsorship activations give your brand access to the event’s audience, offering them an opportunity to “meet” your brand in person, in an environment that’s ripe for making memorable interactions.
Data Collection
The Service: Measuring return on investment for experiential marketing events like brand activations can be challenging. Brand activation agencies know how to integrate data collection into planning, promoting, and launching brand experiences. From establishing clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) to tracking attendee behavior at the event to assessing online engagement and sales afterward, agencies can make sure your brand has solid data to work with in your post-event analysis.
The Benefit: The data collected before, during, and after your brand activation will help you better understand your target audience, how your brand is perceived, how consumers interact with your product, what consumers like about your brand, and what resonates most strongly with them. Data collected from online interactions, such as website traffic, social media, and customer reviews will help assess brand awareness and customers’ wants and needs. Feeding this data back into your marketing campaigns allows you to further personalize your events and marketing to capture your ideal customers.
Sampling
The Service: Sampling campaigns are complex undertakings, with an array of logistical, staffing, and permitting concerns that differ from other activations. That’s why many brands turn to activation agencies to strategize and run in-person sampling events. Agencies are experienced in sampling strategy and tactics, from how to present the product to how to package it and how to engage consumers.
The Benefit: The benefits of sampling are well documented, with studies showing two-thirds to three-quarters of consumers who sample buying those very products. Sampling can also inspire brand loyalty, as consumers experience a brand firsthand, with no risk, sparking a connection to the brand that stays with them.
Trade Shows
The Service: Trade show booths get more fabulous by the minute, and the pressure to compete visually and experientially is intense. Brand activation agencies stay on top of what’s hot now and look ahead to emerging trends, making them an ideal partner for planning and executing a trade show presence that will make your brand stand out.
The Benefit: Because they draw thousands of attendees who are, by definition, a receptive audience eager for new experiences, trade shows are an excellent place to showcase your brand one-on-one to consumers. Trade shows also create an opportunity to collect qualitative and quantitative data about how your brand is perceived, what consumers like and don’t like about your products, and more — data you can feed back into your marketing strategy. A brand activation agency can help you use the event not only as a show-and-tell for your brand but also as a market research medium.
Custom Installations & Oversized Props
The Service: Custom-designed installations and oversized props can up the experience value of your activation significantly — and working with a brand activation agency can take the giant ice cream cone or game-show set of your dreams from drawing board to reality. Agencies with deep experience in experiential marketing know how to make it happen.
The Benefit: For strict visual appeal, it’s tough to beat a massively oversized prop. At a crowded environment like a music festival, a beach boardwalk, or other high-traffic area, an oversized prop can help your activation stand out and draw passers-by looking for fun photo ops. On a trade show floor crowded with dozens or hundreds of booths, a custom installation gives your activation an immersive kick that makes a memorable impact on consumers.
Culinary Expertise
The Service: Activations hosted by food and beverage brands need culinary experts and staff members to help plan, prepare, and serve guests — but so do non-food brands, particularly at events where food and beverages abound and offering refreshments is expected. Brand activation companies understand this and are expert at matching brands with culinary professionals who can help them connect with consumers. Typically, agencies have contacts in the local and regional food industry who can assist with menu creation, food-related logistics, and even onsite research such as taste tests.
The Benefit: Everybody loves free food (and beverages), right? Offering free refreshments to attendees is a great way to draw a crowd and make them stick around for a few minutes. It can also be a kindness — think offering bottles of cold water on a hot day — that triggers a sense of reciprocity.
Event & Street Team Staffing
The Service: Because of their knowledge of your brand and its products, your own staff will be a great asset at any experiential event. But they might not be enough — and what if the event’s not local? Your team more than likely needs backup.
The Benefit: Brand activation companies are great at determining the number of people you need to support the event, filling such roles as grabbing the attention of passersby to assisting attendees to collecting email addresses. Experiential marketing agencies know how to hire, vet, and train a team of enthusiastic, professional event staff to represent your brand well.
Swag
The Service: Promotional items like pens, T-shirts, and water bottles have been given away as a marketing tactic for generations for the simple reason that swag works. A brand activation agency can work with clients to brainstorm swag ideas that fit the upcoming event and audience. The higher-quality and more useful the items, the more the swag will help the brand connect with customers.
The Benefit: Not only does accepting a piece of swag incur a sense of obligation in the recipient, it’s also a reminder of the brand, and of the experiential marketing event itself, cementing that positive experience in the consumer’s mind.
Logistics Planning & Execution
The Service: Finding and securing the perfect venue; navigating licensing and permitting requirements; transporting product, custom installations, and swag to the venue — logistics touches every aspect of an experiential marketing event, and it’s one of the most important roles a brand activation agency can fill.
The Benefit: The agency’s role in any activation is first and foremost a successful event — and part of that means making the entire process as hassle-free as possible for you and your team. Letting the professionals drive means less hassle, potentially less expense, and no unhappy surprises when event day arrives.
Project Management
The Service: Brand activations have a lot of moving parts — creative, staffing, logistics — that must be assembled piece by piece, across weeks or months. There are details, a lot of them, and moving the event from concept to completion requires attention to all of them. Keeping everything running smoothly is a full-time job, and it’s one that agencies excel at.
The Benefit: Better planning makes for a better activation, and greater success in achieving your brand’s goals.
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