For the business of today, staying relevant is a constant battle. Digital technology has provided consumers with a thousand and one distractions and a hundred different ways to engage with them. To capture the imagination, you have to be striking and innovative. You have to give customers something that they’ve never experienced before. Or, you have to offer them a completely new angle on something familiar.
This is no easy feat and many startups and smaller businesses find themselves struggling because they fail to build upon that original great idea. They don’t know how to engage on a level beyond the basic promotion and purchase cycle. Yet, this can be achieved via creative experiential marketing events. By inviting consumers to interact with a brand, you are encouraging them to personally and emotionally invest in it too.
I’ll cover some of the most important reasons why you should be using experiential marketing to increase brand awareness.
We Know That It Is Effective
Even something as simple as hiring a branded photo booth or giving out free samples of a product can significantly boost exposure. We know that experiential marketing works because it isn’t a new strategy. For decades, companies have been out on the street, trying to get people involved with brands in a more spontaneous fashion.
The difference between then and now is that consumers are looking for more sophisticated encounters. They want something that they can share on social media or tell their friends about. They want the connection between the experience and the brand to be easy. This is why things like QR codes can be really effective; they bridge that gap between experimenting with a brand and investing in it.
It Creates an Emotional Connection
Experiential and event marketing is true to the core values of customer engagement, which emphasise the importance of emotion. We all use our emotions to pick products and select the brands that we want to engage with. If we didn’t, we’d simply choose the first one that we see on the supermarket shelf.
Traditionally, this emotional connection has been constructed via print and television advertising, but the saturation of these mediums means that they are less powerful than they used to be. Experiential marketing can be more effective because you’re actually immersing customers in the brand. They’re not just watching it on television; they’re touching, smelling, tasting, and personally evaluating it.
It Can be Integrated with Digital Platforms
One of the best things about event marketing is that it lends itself very well to digital sharing and interaction. You could shoot video footage of an experiential event or taster session. Once it is uploaded and shared on social media, users will be keen to spot themselves in it and show their friends and family members. Content like this then takes on a life of its own, as it is passed from actual consumers to potential and future ones.
How to Take the First Step towards Customer Immersion
The success of experiential marketing is all about planning. You need to know exactly what you’re going to do and who you’re trying to reach. Cost effective, low budget events can be just as powerful as lavish ones, but they have to offer something different. They should also be easily accessible to allow for as much brand exposure as possible. Try to make your event public, striking, and hard to ignore.