Do you want to gain more attention and ensure as many people as possible leave your events feeling fantastic? In this scenario, they’d be so impressed, immersed or inspired that they couldn’t help but tell others about the experience.
That is the essence of experiential marketing, a strategy that provides memorable face-to-face and offline experiences (and online, too, which we’ll get to later) to users or guests to achieve a business goal. Think about traditional events like concerts, festivals and trade shows – but making them interactive and connecting potential customers directly with brands without losing sight of the marketing message.
Does this sound like something you’d like to try this year? To help you decide, let’s dive into a fuller discussion of the experiential marketing strategy:
• What is experiential marketing vs. brand activation vs. event marketing?
• Three experiential marketing examples
• How do you deploy effective experiential marketing campaigns?
• Initiate activation with an experience marketing agency
What Is Experiential Marketing vs. Brand Activation vs. Event Marketing?
To understand why experiential marketing matters and will matter in the post-COVID-19 world, let’s look at its role in digital marketing strategy development. Further, let’s compare and contrast it with similar strategies based on their primary tactics: capturing the attention of a group or groups of people through event-hosting. So, how does experiential marketing work differently than brand activation and event marketing?
Brand activation is often tied to the launch of a new product or service. But it involves more than, say, unveiling this season’s lipstick shades, unboxing a shiny new device or demonstrating the process of using your software solution.
Brand activations should evoke emotional reactions through activities showing users how the offering can make their life better. For example, Apple’s “One Night on iPhone 7” tapped two British photographers to test the phone model’s low-light capture capabilities. The campaign presented a new feature alongside its benefits to iPhone fans and mobile photographers.
What’s experiential marketing, then? As the name suggests, this strategy focuses on experiences. Take note that experiential marketing campaigns as a whole can include brand activations. But when it comes to implementation, experience marketing has more leeway to include activities that don’t speak directly to your product or service.
A good example would be Fashion Revolution’s “2 Euro T-Shirt” campaign. The team put a bright turquoise vending machine selling T-shirts for 2 euros in the middle of a busy area in Berlin, Germany. Before claiming the cheap clothes, customers were shown a video talking about the poor conditions in which the goods were produced. They would then have the option to continue buying or donate the 2 euros instead.
While Fashion Revolution was not selling clothes, its experiential marketing insights raised awareness of the organization’s cause and created a memorable experience for the participants.
Lastly, there is event marketing, which can be mistaken for an experiential marketing strategy. It’s the one we’re most familiar with if we’ve attended live or in-person events like concerts, seminars, conferences and trade shows. In modern marketing, online events such as live-streaming and webinars also fall under this category. Its focus is maximum exposure and information dissemination rather than designing a memorable experience for the audience.
Top experiential marketing agencies may argue that experiential marketing has the highest chances of delivering memorable experiences to consumers. That’s because it employs tactics like sensory experiential marketing, which appeals to the senses on top of emotions. Let’s have a look at the experiential marketing examples below to prove that point.
Three Experiential Marketing Ideas for Inspiration
Dedicated experiential marketing firms or internet marketing agencies with an experience marketing focus allow their creativity to soar. Indeed, this marketing strategy is like the more fun and daring sibling of event marketing.
What’s experiential marketing like? Let these brands show you:
Dunkin’ Donuts
In Seoul, busy urbanites prefer their coffee to go. But competing for their attention became a challenge for doughnut-and-coffee chain Dunkin’ Donuts because 1) South Koreans didn’t associate it with coffee, 2) they’d choose other global or homegrown cafés and 3) they didn’t have time to stop by for doughnuts.
So, together with a South Korean experience marketing agency, Dunkin’ Donuts aimed to change that perception. And here’s a perfect example of why experiential marketing mixes well with other strategies. Combining radio advertising with sensory experiential marketing, they brought the marketing message to Seoulites’ daily experience. They placed aroma dispensers in Seoul buses which released coffee scent whenever their radio jingle played. There was also a reminder for listeners to buy coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts.
With 320,000 people privy to the radio sensory experiential marketing campaign, called “flavor radio” by the experiential marketing agency, Dunkin’ Donuts saw its visits rise by 16 percent and sales by 29 percent.
JetBlue
Here’s something reliable experiential marketing companies would tell you: This strategy requires a strong brand association even without focusing on a product or service. The connection should be strong enough for the customer to remember you, and the bridge to that is a memorable moment.
In an increasingly virtual world, what would an airline like JetBlue do? While simply raffling free flights sounds great, the company had better experiential marketing ideas. Experiential marketing firms would approve of the business’s creative plan to dish out free summer items, including free tickets, to promote JetBlue’s flight from New York to Palm Springs in the dead of winter. The company placed 6×6-foot ice blocks on New York City street corners and enticed people to chip at them to claim their prize. This experiential marketing strategy simultaneously used social media marketing to spread the word, leveraging social proof and making a mark.
Volkswagen
Here’s an idea if you’re wondering, “how does experiential marketing work for car companies and other non-retail industries?” Make the experience fun and unique, and your experiential marketing insights can turn viral.
In 2009, the automotive company Volkswagen installed piano keys on subway stairs as a part of its Fun Theory project. We imagine the brand worked with one of the top experiential marketing companies to test whether a fun activity would encourage behavior change in people – taking the piano stairs instead of the subway elevator. For 66 percent of the participants, the answer was a resounding yes.
While it was an innovative way to promote the brand’s energy-saving BlueMotion technology, the campaign focused on crafting an experience. Its social media marketing component has also expanded the impact of the experience. As of writing, the uploaded piano staircase video has over 7.5 million views on YouTube.
How Does Experiential Marketing Work? Five Best Practices
For in-house marketing teams or dedicated experiential marketing firms, there are standard practices to adhere to for deploying successful experiential marketing campaigns. Here are the starting steps inspired by brands and recommended by top experiential marketing agencies:
1. Appeal to Emotions – Digital & Otherwise
Building emotional connections is the chief reason why experiential marketing is trending in 2021. For one, it transcends the physical limitations we face right now, which make it impossible for face-to-face event marketing to flourish. The other thing is that this marketing strategy aligns with the rise of digital emotions.
This is where experiential marketing websites and social media campaigns come in. When employing these tactics, you need to take note of digital emotions, which comprise non-verbal and non-visual cues. You can’t see a person’s facial expressions or hear their tone of voice online. Instead, you’re likely to understand how your customers or users feel through engagement cues like likes and shares and languages like emoji. Also consider online behavior factors, such as apps and sites visited, geolocation and devices used.
Analytics help you see some of that. But it’s been an ongoing challenge and opportunity for many experiential marketing companies to create brand-customer interactions that don’t lose sight of our evolving humanity.
2. Appeal to All Senses
As you appeal to digital emotions, do not discount physical factors altogether. Lifestyles may drastically change within and after COVID. But our need to physically experience things remains.
Experiential marketing ideas like Dunkin’ Donuts’ radio ad-coffee aroma and Volkswagen’s musical stairs engage people’s senses. Your campaign does not have to be massive. Something as simple as a pop-up vending machine with a video can change minds and behaviors. But you’d want to take it up a notch by captivating more or all of the senses.
3. Craft Mobile Experiences
Create fully-mobile experiential marketing websites and apps. In launching its latest campaign featuring a popular music group, a telecommunications company asked its users to visit a microsite on their mobile device. The site displayed various colors that resembled the effect of glow sticks in concerts. Users watched the campaign ad premiere while holding their mobile glow sticks, took photos and videos and shared about their experience on social media.
By leveraging smartphones and mobile tech, top experiential marketing agencies can design such a memorable experience for your target audience.
4. Maximize Virtual Content
If you have the capacity or want to embrace augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) experiential marketing campaigns, discuss it with an experiential marketing agency. They can initiate you into the basics of these channels.
The experiential marketing insights and possibilities are endless. For instance, the virtual reality concert held on the Fortnite platform shows us what can be done in a video game environment.
Depending on your industry or budget, you also don’t have to be overly high-tech. What’s experiential marketing for one company may differ from others. Producing organic and live videos with relatable content, making people feel as if they’re part of the journey of the brand, is another good place to start.
5. Turn People Into Brand Ambassadors
From experiential marketing websites to immersive creative showcases, you have a growing range of campaign ideas to choose from.
Cosmetics brand Lush opted for the latter and launched an annual grand live event pre-pandemic. It’s an ideal example of an experience marketing agency-led project that includes brand activations. But aside from product promotions, the company also used experiences to ensure their consumers understand their ethical and digital values.
There were highly Instagrammable installations, too. So imagine how much social proof that would have built for Lush. It’s also managed to boost its online reputation, thanks to experiential marketing.
Initiate Activation: Partner With an Experiential Marketing Agency
From understanding the answer to “What is experiential marketing?” to reading about successful campaigns, you must have a lot to take in. But we hope you have built a better appreciation for this marketing strategy and how it can increase social proof.
Implementing the steps will depend on your strategy. Also, there may be multiple tactics to try, but only a few will deliver your desired results. And so, after knowing the basics and assessing what you can and can do alone, we highly recommend you to consider experiential marketing companies.
At Thrive, we focus on bringing experiences that not only evoke emotional and sensory delights in your target audience but also yield optimal event return on investment (ROI). As a company offering sustainable digital marketing solutions, we specialize in mixing experiential marketing with other strategies such as social media marketing, video production and online reputation management.
Let’s roll out your first campaign with support from our experts. Reach out at 866-908-4748 for more information on getting started.
