What is Experiential Marketing?
Experiential marketing, or event marketing, is all about creating a connection for consumers between a brand and themselves, allowing them to experience the brand first-hand. It’s an opportunity to sell to potential customers by enabling them to live it, feel it and interact with the brand in a way that fosters a deeper emotional connection.
It’s an opportunity to invite your consumers to step inside your brand and experience everything you have to offer in a real-life, immersive way.
Why is experiential marketing so important?
Build emotional connections: Wwe buy from brands we love, we buy from brands we trust! In a world where we are constantly bombarded by marketing content and consumable options all day, every day, it’s incredibly important to stand out from the crowd.
The best way to break through the noise is to evoke feelings and strong emotional connections between your consumers and your brand. These feelings can be of excitement, joy or maybe even nostalgia, whatever they are, the stronger feeling, the stronger brand loyalty these consumers will have.
Creating Moments to Share
When social media is everywhere, user-generated content is the best form of content to get your customers excited – hearing and learning from their peers helps to build trust in your brand. There is no better advertisement than word of mouth!
Experiential marketing events done well, with lots of ‘Instagrammable’ moments, provide a great base for guests to snap away and share content with their online following.
The organic sharing will help to increase your brands reach to new potential customers far beyond the actual event, and without any additional spend from you.
Driving Loyalty
If a customer has an incredible in-person experience with you at your pop-up event, they are more likely to develop loyalty to your brand.
Think about your own life experience; when you meet a business owner and get to know them, you are more inclined to work with them and continue to work with them.
Experiential events can turn a one-time customer into a brand advocate who comes back time and time again, and sings your praises from the rooftop.
Experiential Marketing Examples
Every year, IKEA invites a handful of people to spend the night in one of their stores, where they can experience the sleepover atmosphere and hear sleep tips from those in the know.
The event gets people talking about IKEA for weeks after, how cool to sleep in an IKEA store. Imagine if this was you, you would tell everyone and anyone who listened after the event you got to sleep in the store.
This becomes free word of mouth marketing for IKEA, and as we know recommendations and referrals are the best form of marketing.
Kit-Kat is all about taking a break and pausing the everyday hustle and bustle of life. ‘Have a break, have a Kit-Kat’ is their marketing slogan and the focus of their branding activities.
Their activation focused on setting up micro events all around the city of Amsterdam, specifically in areas without Wi-Fi access and dubbed’ no-free Wi-Fi zones’. The benches and spaces allowed people to sit down, have a Kit-Kat and relax.
Recently, the brand Jelly Cat went viral and took the world by storm with its fish and chips popup in London.
The plush toy brand took the basis of an average and iconic London fish and chips van and sold their own plush toy, complete with the seaside experience of being wrapped in branded butchers paper, fresh from the plush deep fryer.
Our top tips to implementing your experiential marketing strategy:
- Know your audience, just like we always say (and is one of the steps in our event strategy blueprint). Knowing your audience is imperative. Once you define your audience, you are able to tailor an experience that will actually resonate with them and more likely result in a successful campaign. As the saying goes, you can’t sell ice to an Eskimo.
- Create a story: in order to ensure your guests have that emotional connection we talked about before, you need to make sure you are taking them on a journey and curating a story for them to follow and buy into. A few elements slapped together will drastically show and leave guests confused and unsure of the connection.
- Measure the impact: like any event, we don’t do any event just for the sake of it; we have to make sure it is achieving goals and makes sense to complete. It’s imperative to be able to measure the success of the event. Metrics like social media, sales and brand awareness are great ways to see if your experiential campaign was successful.
Experiential marketing is here, and it’s here to stay. It’s a dynamic tool to put you ahead of your competitors and help to show your customers just how they should feel and interact with your brand. Successful immersive experiences can transform your consumers from first-time purchases to brand fanatics to live and breathe your product.
How we can help?
Celebrate and relax! Enjoy the fact that you have just delivered your event; it’s a huge milestone.
If you’re still not sure on any of the above, reach out – we love chatting about how to elevate your next event and making sure you’re not missing anything!
