A successful marketing campaign is usually worth the investment of working capital necessary to fund it. One of most effective new methods to market a company is through experiential marketing. This form of advertising creates an immersive experience for the consumer, highlighting your company’s brand or product through sensory manipulation. Creating an event or show the consumer actually experiences helps guarantee you create a lasting impression. The same way a jingle can get stuck in your head, the goal of an experiential marketing campaign is to get lodged in consumers’ minds long after the actual event.
Many marketers use event marketing to provide consumers with a better understanding of what their products and services do. There’s an obvious reason for this: Consumers respond to these events. According to The Business Journals, a staggering 93 percent of consumers said they are more likely to experience a live event over a television commercial. In addition, 96 percent said they’d be more likely to purchase the product or service after witnessing a live event, while 84 percent of that figure said they’d probably buy it twice.
Companies creating experiences
Businesses are taking notice of how consumers are reacting to these campaigns. BMW created their “Ultimate Driving Experience” – where consumers could feel what it was like to drive their car – which lead to 5 percent of participants saying they would purchase a BMW product, Clickz reported. The car company plans to increase its event marketing.
Delta launched their interactive ad campaign at the TED 2015 Conference with great success, EventMarketer reported. The airline company’s event, dubbed “The Art of Stillness,” let attendees step into a glass and mirror chamber intended to calm down consumers during an otherwise hectic event.
Delta’s General Manager of Marketing and Communications Mauricio Parise said 800 of the 2,000 TED attendees experienced the installment, and of those, 95 percent tweeted about it.
“From a reach perspective, it is not just the 750 tweets,” said Parise. “Those people have a massive following, and they will talk about it and then you start accumulating conversation about something that is interesting to them, and Delta is a part of that story.”
Launching a successful experiential marketing campaign
Small-business owners can learn a lot from larger companies. Although you might not have the marketing budget to recreate the contests at the same level of the big businesses, there are still ways to implement a strategic experiential marketing campaign to increase brand awareness and sell more products.
One of the most important factors for one of these events is to create an experience that consumers have never encountered before. This makes the event more memorable and increases the likelihood that more people will want to try it out.
Unlike the sensory limitations inherent in traditional forms of marketing, you can control how the consumer experiences the event. While a television commercial can only rely on sights and sounds, you should include ways to stimulate all five senses.
Incorporate as much social media technology as possible. Encourage consumers to tweet about the experience and post links about it so their friends and family also share it. The more participants that share their experiences and reactions online, the greater the chance the campaign will go viral.
Although an experiential marketing campaign is in many ways unique from other forms of advertising, there is one place they share a similarity: time limits. In the same way that a billboard has a few seconds to capture a consumer’s attention, the event should accomplish the same goal. You have a few precious moments for your brand to make an impact on the consumer, so don’t squander that opportunity with superfluous and unnecessary aspects that might distract from the core message.
