What Is Experiential Marketing?
What can you give the consumer who already has everything?
New experiences. Today’s consumers crave novel experiences that surprise and delight. Increasingly, brands are turning to experiential marketing to connect with consumers through interactive, hands-on events that create positive, memorable experiences. Experiential events don’t showcase the brand’s products or services as much as they invite consumers into the brand’s world, motivating them to become part of the brand’s story. Experiential marketers excel at creating fun, positive encounters with consumers in a wide range of contexts:
- Pop-up shops and installations
- Product launches and demonstrations
- Brand activations at festivals and events
- Sampling events in high-traffic locations
- Mobile tours and roadshows
Agencies that specialize in experiential marketing provide services specifically designed to facilitate memorable and engaging interactions between brands and their target audiences. Here are some of them.
Creative Consulting & Planning
At the outset of planning an experiential marketing event or campaign, experiential marketing agencies work with clients to learn about their brands’ products, personality, story, and goals then strategize ways to find and engage consumers. Agencies’ creative teams follow the trends, and they know what’s happening in experiential marketing events around the world — so they’re well positioned to anticipate your audience’s expectations and interests.
The agency’s professional expertise and industry knowledge are invaluable in this process, but getting a fresh, objective perspective on your brand is equally impactful. An agency isn’t tied to the “way it’s always been” and can offer an unbiased look at the brand and its audience, how to reach more of its ideal customers, and how to connect with them.
The agency’s team of project managers, copywriters, graphic designers, and marketers develop concepts that align with the brand’s identity and objectives, then work with in-house talent and vendors to bring the concepts to life.
Logistics
Experiential marketing events are made up of numerous moving parts, both figuratively and literally. These include finding and reserving the right venue; ensuring that the venue’s infrastructure supports the event; navigating licensing and permitting requirements; finding on-site staff and local vendors; and transporting product, custom installations, and swag to the venue, then setting it up for the launch. Logistics is one of the most important roles in staging an activation, pop-up, or other experiential campaign.
Logistics is detail-intensive and somewhat unforgiving — dropping a step, or failing to secure a permit could derail the event. That’s why one of the best reasons to work with an agency is their logistical experience. Letting the professionals handle logistics means less hassle, fewer mistakes, potentially less expense, and no unpleasant surprises on event day.
Immersive Technology
Working with an experiential marketing agency expands opportunities to incorporate augmented reality and virtual reality into activations, pop-ups, trade show booths and other experiential marketing. The effect is transformative, turning the activation space into a fully immersive, multisensory experience that creates deeper engagement by customers. Other technology like photo booths and digital photo walls lets attendees become part of the story as they share their photos online and at the event.
Event Staffing
You and your team are the best advocates for your brand, hands down. You know your products, your people, your story. And your involvement in planning and executing experiential marketing is important. But there are only so many of you, and pulling off any experiential marketing campaign requires staff to promote the event, grab the attention of passers-by, run surveys, do interviews, collect email addresses, answer questions, and more, depending on the nature of the event and expected attendance. Experiential marketing agencies have solutions for this, even when the event isn’t local
During the planning process, the agency will help determine how many staff you need and what they need to know to work your event. They’ll find, hire, and train staff and street team members — who will pass out flyers, give away samples, hand out swag, and provide a friendly, person-to-person interaction with consumers — then get them trained on your brand’s products and story so they can represent your brand positively.
Props & Custom Installations
Oversized props are eye-catching, fun, and memorable. They create a sense of wonder, they present playful photo opportunities, and they create an indelible sense of what your brand is about in a single, vivid image.
Custom installations give structure and realness to immersive experiences, allowing brands to create mini-worlds that offer participants a visually stunning, entirely fresh experience. Imagine being able to invite consumers into your brand — into a world saturated with color and multisensory impact. Both oversized props and custom installations increase the emotional impact of your activation or pop-up. And in a crowded setting like a festival or sporting event, they can make a real difference in attendance and increase brand awareness.
Sampling Campaigns
As a sales tactic, sampling is historically wildly successful, with some studies showing up to 75% of samplers buy the product they sample. People love free stuff, and they’re more likely to try something new when the risk is literally zero. Sampling also incurs a sense of obligation — a need to reciprocate — and that itself is a connection between brand and consumer.
Sampling campaigns can be complex logistically, with staffing and permitting requirements greater than other activations. Experiential marketing companies know the ropes, 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 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.
Experiential Marketing Vehicles
Customized food trucks, buses, RVs, tuk tuks and glass box trucks are a common sight on college campuses, at beaches, and at sporting events. Experiential marketing vehicles are mobile, fun, eye-catching, and can be wrapped in your brand’s logo and the interior equipped to serve as a mobile kitchen, salon, or boutique.
The mobility and relatively small size of vehicles means they can go wherever your target audience is and change locations from day to day. Experiential marketing agencies provide the guidance, experiential marketing graphic designers, and connections with vendors to get the right vehicle for the purpose.
Sponsorships
Sponsoring local events like football games, marathons, and arts festivals is a great way to demonstrate commitment to the community and support for local causes and activities. A standard sponsorship will put your logo on the program or banner. Taking sponsorship a step further, into actual involvement with the event itself, sends a more powerful message of community and support. For these reasons, more and more brands are choosing to hold activations at events they sponsor.
Sponsorship activations boost brand awareness and can give new audiences the opportunity to connect with your brand and you the opportunity to tell your brand’s story in a positive, supportive environment.
The key to successful sponsorship activations is alignment: Seek sponsorship opportunities with events that are a good fit for your brand. The idea is to elevate the experience for attendees, not overwhelm them with brand messaging. A health-food brand might sponsor a 5K, for example. A ceramics studio that offers lessons and space for DIY projects would fit in well at an arts festival.
Data Gathering, Analysis & Assessment
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 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. And within the confines of your event, behavior tracking can help identify pain points, awkward traffic patterns, and areas consumers find especially intriguing. Feeding this data back into your marketing campaigns allows you to further personalize your events and marketing to capture your ideal customers.
Contingency Planning
Like the contingency plans you likely have in place for your business, contingency plans for experiential marketing events aim to ensure continuity in the face of a catastrophe, large or small. Experiential marketing pros build contingency plans to account for transportation obstacles, bad weather, security issues, communication breakdowns, and unexpectedly low attendance.
The point of the plan is to minimize disruptions, improve decision making, and help protect your brand’s reputation. The aim of any experiential marketing event is to create a positive, memorable experience for the audience, and the goal of a contingency plan is to ensure it happens.
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