Have you ever wondered why experiential marketing is so important for brand activations? Experiential marketing is the most important component of brand activations, as it helps create an emotional connection between the customer and the brand. In this article, we will be discussing the essential role of experiential marketing in brand activations, the benefits it provides, and how to create a successful experiential marketing campaign.
What is experiential marketing?
Experiential marketing is a type of marketing that gives prospects or customers real-life experiences to raise awareness, build understanding, or sell more products or services.
These experiences can be in person, like live events, trade shows, demo days, etc., or online, like webinars and conferences.
In the past few years, virtual reality and augmented reality have made experiential marketing more and more possible.
However, according to experiential trends, 67% of consumers don’t show up for low-cost or free virtual events.
On the other hand, 75% of B2C marketers believe in-person events are vital to their success.
Why is experiential marketing important?
Experiential marketing has become increasingly important because it allows businesses to connect deeper with customers. The key difference between experiential marketing and other types of marketing is that an experience takes place in “real” life.
The main advantages:
- Increase brand awareness
- Make a search demand.
- Create a bond between a brand and its audience.
- Deliver authentic in-person experiences.
- Capitalize on the fear of missing out.
- Boost a product or service trial.
- Boost sales conversions
Why is experiential marketing effective?
Experiential marketing works because it taps into human emotion. It allows a brand to create a connection with its audience that goes beyond the products or services they provide. By making customers part of their story, brands can create a more personal connection that can lead to greater customer loyalty. Experiential marketing also allows brands to create memorable experiences that customers can recall long after the event has ended. By creating a unique and engaging experience, customers will walk away with a positive memory of the brand, which can lead to increased loyalty and trust.
Experiential Marketing: Features
One of the most distinguishing pros of this is that it doesn’t connect customers to a limited range of products or services, but to a brand.
While most marketing strategies target sales, experiential marketing strategies target experiences.
If experiential marketing is done well, customers will have a good time and be more likely to try other products from the brand.
Experiential marketing achieves that via the following motives at its foundation:
- It is all about creating and delivering individual experiences. These experiences are in real-time.
- Experiential marketing transcends products and services.
- The experience, as delivered, is compelling, memorable, and positive.
- This experience should increase brand favorability among the target audience.
- This good impression should lead to sales, preference for the brand, brand recall, or any other metric set by the brand.
- This is all about generating a positive ROI.
Experiential marketing has been redefined by the ground-breaking introduction of social media into the marketing circuit. Let’s see how.
- When a particular experience moves a person, she shares her emotions with her friends, coworkers, etc.
- This sharing, it has been noticed, is done with a mass of people who have linguistic or ideological affinities with the sharer.
- Likes, shares, retweets, etc. serve as indicators of the extent of this sharing.
At the moment, marketers are not sure about the extent to which a brand’s virtual image or social media status helps their business.
However, a positive correlation between social media and experiential marketing has been established.
