5 Steps to Brand Activation Success

Planning 101

In experiential marketing events like brand activations, careful planning is vital. Planning helps ensure the brand checks all the boxes when it comes to attracting the desired audience, delivering the right message, and creating a memorable experience that resonates with attendees. A solid plan provides a roadmap for success, ensuring that the activation builds brand awareness, lays the foundation for customer loyalty, and generates data the brand can use to shape future directions. “Whether you’re crafting your first campaign, or seeking to optimize your existing strategies, understanding the dynamics of brand activation is vital for leaving a mark on your target audience,” says a Mailchimp article.

1. Define Your Objectives

A well-defined activation plan starts with clear goals and objectives. These could include increasing brand awareness, boosting sales, generating leads, launching a new product, or building customer loyalty.

Dig deep in defining your objectives: determine not only what you want to accomplish but also how you’ll measure effectiveness, how the event will fit into the brand’s overall marketing plan, and when the event and its impact will occur. This process identifies what you want to achieve, ties the goal/s to reality, and builds in a means of measuring results from the beginning of the process.

2. Understand Your Audience

Determining who you’re trying to reach with the activation is an essential step in the planning process, because it informs so many of the choices that follow: location, timing, marketing, messaging, and creative direction.

Start by understanding your current customers: who’s already interacting with your brand, how are they doing it, why did they choose your brand, and what are their challenges? Seek feedback from them via polls or surveys asking them about their preferences, challenges they face, and what kind of products they find valuable. Analyze customers’ online reviews of your brand’s products or services. Conduct interviews with some of your most loyal customers to find out why they chose (and continue to choose) your brand.

Tap into data sources you likely already have to gather insights into these consumers. Gather social media insights through both the analytics built into social media platforms and “listening” to online conversations. Analyze website traffic data to see which pages get the most views, how long visitors are staying on your site, and where they leave.

Create personas for the consumers you hope to reach with the activation. These fictional representations of your ideal customers include their demographics, behaviors, goals, and pain points, and they give you something to refer back to throughout the planning process.

3. Develop a Creative Concept

What is the central message or story you want to tell, and how does it connect with your brand and target audience? Information gathered in the preceding steps should provide ample data for developing personas for event attendees. Starting with that well-developed sense of who your ideal customers are, brainstorm concepts that align with both audience interests and the brand’s identity. Look for ways to translate your core values into an interactive experience. Create relevance by leveraging current events or trends. Find out what your brand’s competitors are doing and find ways to differentiate yourself.

When designing creative aspects of your brand activation, pay attention to the sensory experience, brand alignment, interactivity, and uniqueness. Engaging, memorable activations are immersive, offering participants an experience that’s multi-sensory and interactive. Keep the activation and its messaging aligned with your brand’s personality by testing each element against the brand’s vibe and values. Think of the event as an opportunity to tell the brand’s story as it relates to the target audience.

4. Manage Logistics: Location, Timing, Execution

Knowing your target audience and the message and media you’ll use to reach them, identify the right location/s for the event. There are two aspects to this: (1) choosing the city/state/region with the optimal concentration of your intended audience; (2) selecting a venue within that area that’s the best space for your event. “Select a venue that aligns with your brand and is easily accessible to your target audience,” bluewatertech.com advises. This could be a high-traffic area, a local shopping district, or a themed location relevant to your brand. Choose a location your audience already knows or will already be in to increase the chances that they’ll encounter your event spontaneously or be willing to seek it out based on social media and other advertising.

The best location for your brand’s event might be a city, state, or region distant from your brand’s headquarters. Every city, county, and state has its own set of zoning laws and permitting requirements. And every location has its “seasons” — times of the year when weather, holiday schedules, regional traditions, sporting events, and other happenings combine to create optimal activation conditions. Working with an agency that has deep expertise in the logistical aspects of brand activations can be enormously helpful in this regard. “With experiential,” explains Promobile in a recent logistics article, “the creative is only the beginning — the bulk of the work is in the execution, and the execution involves a lot of moving parts. It all comes down to logistics.”

5. Create a Plan to Measure Results

Brand activations not only offer an unparalleled opportunity to interact with current and prospective customers, they’re also your best opportunity to find out who your customers are, and how you can nurture the relationship. Only by measuring the event’s effectiveness can you glean those insights.

Lay the groundwork for post-event analysis by establishing KPIs and ways to measure them from the very beginning. “Utilizing KPIs that align with the campaign’s objectives provides valuable insights,” says Mailchimp. “Useful metrics may include engagement rates, increased brand awareness, social media impressions, website traffic, and conversion rates.

If you’ll want to know how many people visited the activation, find a reliable way to keep a running headcount. If social media engagement is part of your goals, create a unique social media hashtag for the event. Build an event-specific landing page on your website to direct consumers to before, during, and after the event. Track media coverage surrounding the activation, including articles, mentions on TV, or radio appearances.

Conducting surveys before and after the activation can offer insight into attendee experience, brand perception, and overall satisfaction. Want to build your email list? Make email collection part of the event by making it a requirement to play an interactive game, collect a premium swag item, or receive a discount toward future purchases. And if you’ve done activations before, review those metrics to establish a means of comparison.

By carefully planning and executing your brand activation, you can effectively engage your target audience, achieve your marketing goals, and build a strong brand presence.

Promobile Marketing is a dynamic experiential marketing agency based in New York City. For over a decade, Promobile Marketing has collaborated with a range of brands—from budding startups to major CPG brands—on immersive marketing campaigns. Get in touch to discuss your next project.