You may be asking yourself whether experiential marketing is something that people will be interested in. I think yes! There is a logical reason why experiential marketing is making a comeback. Recent years have left a void in most consumers' lives and significantly affected how companies market and reach individuals. People have missed interacting with others, and in-person events can tap into that nostalgia and help your brand stand out.
While digital marketing immediately connects people with what they're looking for online, experiential marketing creates a memorable experience for consumers looking to purchase a product.
Let's explore experiential marketing and its importance for your overall marketing strategy.
What is Experiential Marketing?
At its most basic, experiential marketing is a marketing tactic in which businesses interact with consumers directly in an offline setting. You may also hear the terms “live marketing” or “event marketing experience.”
Regardless of the technical term or how someone defines it, experiential marketing aims to immerse consumers in a life experience to create and retain brand loyalty. Think of that free birthday drink from Starbucks or the discount code you receive in your inbox when you sign up for a newsletter—if a customer has a memorable experience with a specific product or brand, they are more likely to remember that product and purchase it in the future.
Brands can create unique experiences for their consumers by following three fundamental principles of experiential marketing:
- The event must be actively engaging
- The event must be live and unique
- The event should provide multi-sensory stimulation
These points will help you create an active and memorable experience that customers will hold onto and recall when they require a product or service. The key is to have people walk away from their brand experience with a smile and a sense of gratitude for your company.
Importance of Experiential Marketing
Marketing works best when it capitalizes on human emotion and creates long-lasting, enjoyable experiences. These experiential marketing events help people associate your brand with special and potentially life-changing effects.
This also affects people who can’t attend the live event. They will see your brand's impact on those who had the experience live and naturally be curious about what your brand does.
When planning an experiential marketing event, you should partner with an influencer you've identified who speaks to your target audience. These influencers already have the ears of people you want to sell to—so look into your buyer personas and identify social influencers speaking to the same audience.
Experiential marketing is a powerful business strategy because it creates brand loyalty through human connection, which is the end goal of any marketer (digital or otherwise!) worth their salt. Human connection binds people together and creates a stronger bond between your brand and consumer than non-targeted or generic ads and other missed marketing opportunities ever will.
What are the Benefits of Experiential Marketing?
Experiential marketing provides brands a powerful way to forge deeper connections with their audience by creating immersive and memorable experiences. This approach enhances brand engagement, boosts awareness, and fosters loyalty by offering personalized interactions and generating buzz on social media. It also allows for real-time feedback and can set a brand apart from competitors, ultimately driving sales and improving overall brand perception.
Don't forget—Americans see an average of 10,000 ads per day. And unfortunately, most of those advertisements are ignored or barely acknowledged by the average person. But, if a company takes the time to create a memorable experience for their potential customers with customized content, targeted ads, and exciting in-person events, they’ll gain more attention from them and those around them.
How Can Your Brand Take Advantage of Experiential Marketing?
To fully utilize experiential marketing, you must be willing and able to provide a unique experience. Your goal should be to capture people's attention and associate your brand with something unforgettable.
Brands need to create a robust brand strategy that leverages in-person and online activities and makes them work together. The ultimate goal of this brand strategy should be to develop a story around your brand that is authentic and relatable.
Many established brands are experiencing loyalty shake-ups. Since they cannot provide for all of their customers, they continue to lose them until they can actively resolve the situation. Unfortunately, by the time the brand resolves the understock, it has already lost the trust of its previous customers.
Fortunately for you, though, this allows you to capture the attention of those consumers. Utilizing strategic digital marketing tactics post-pandemic maybe your business's competitive edge to establish brand loyalty during this shake-up era.
What Are the Disadvantages of Experiential Marketing?
While creating a memorable experience for people leads to brand loyalty, if your brand isn't already popular and doesn't have a big budget, creating a unique experience will be difficult; you’ll have to get creative.
Additionally, hosting events for only a few people isn't worth the payoff unless they have a massive influence on communities. As a result, you'll find that most established brands focus on creating events that will attract new people.
While smaller brands have to get more creative, more established brands have to spend more money to make the more significant impact they're looking to make. Experiential marketing is, therefore, known to be a costly and sometimes risky marketing endeavor.
This is why experiential marketing tactics need to work hand-in-hand with digital marketing. There is always a chance that a consumer will have a negative experience at a live event, which is the opposite effect you want from an experiential marketing campaign. And that's where your developed digital marketing campaign will pick up the slack, with personalized content, customized landing pages, and targeted ads.
Contact WSI to Elevate Your Digital Marketing
Experiential marketing can be crucial to a brand's overall marketing strategy.
The goal of marketing (whether it be digital or experiential!) is to create true loyalty to a brand. Customers are humans and no longer care to be another consumer statistic. By creating unforgettable experiences online and in person, you will play to their humanity and earn your brand some loyal customers. And as one of the largest digital marketing networks of its kind, WSI is well-equipped to help you achieve this.
Contact your WSI consultant to learn more about how we can elevate your digital marketing experience and explore the benefits of experiential marketing.
