Experiential Marketing
For thousands of years, experiential marketing has been a traditional marketing tactic used by businesses. Merchants set up shops and displayed their wares while telling their would-be consumers about their products and services.
What is Experiential Marketing?
Unlike traditional and online marketing, experiential marketing is an effective way to help businesses build brand awareness connections and customer loyalty through live event face-to-face consumer interactions. By using hands-on participation and branding materials, the attendees, future customers, and target audience learn what the company offers and what the business stands for. Through engagement —you are building a memorable, unique customer experience.
Experiential marketing is also known as:
- Event marketing
- Participation marketing
- Engagement marketing
- On-ground marketing
- Loyalty marketing
- Live marketing
Experiential is any marketing effort that happens during a live event and in an in-person physical setting:
- Auto shows
- Trade shows
- Sponsorships
- Test drives
- Samplings
- Kiosks
- Contesting
- In-person surveys
- In-store experiences
- Face-to-face marketing
An experiential marketing campaign is a wider omnichannel strategy that allows you to collect, measure and analyze data across many aspects and regions.
Ultimately, a successful experiential marketing campaign involves customer engagement and activity with whatever is being sold in new and inventive ways. When done right, the consumer connects with a brand in a way that isn’t possible with a virtual event, television, print, radio, social media, or any other digital marketing channel.
While digital and online interaction—particularly viral social media sharing—is a keystone, a large part of the emotional resonance that results from good experiential marketing comes from the physical components that a business (or brand) brings to play.
Online, “virtual” experiential marketing is important to include for most brands, but in-person interactions are one of your biggest differentiators.
Experiential Marketing Benefits
Experiential marketing takes place along the customer’s journey and helps build:
- Brand activations and awareness: Get your business seen and remembered.
- Brand affinity and loyalty: Positive experiences move customers closer to conversion and build loyalty.
- Sample products: Use the senses; let prospects touch, feel, or taste products, and they will remember your brand.
- Expands your brand across media: It keeps your customers talking across social media.
- Lead generation pooling helps gather contact information and data on prospects.
Create An Experiential Marketing Strategy
Experiential marketing is different for every business. Building and driving brand awareness and conversions come in many shapes and sizes. There is no specific way to plan and execute your event, and the main thing is to create a goal, a budget, and a cross-channel promotion plan centered around your audience.
Here are a few best practices to be considered:
- Analyze how customers currently experience your brand.
- If you don’t have one already, put together a platform for your brand on which you can interact with customers.
- Work with your team to align on the complete brand experience. Prioritize the integration of online and offline/real-world experience.
- Identify the types of printed material that can be used to enhance this experience (displays, signage, etc.)
- Disseminate your brand’s value propositions to both external and internal audiences. Make sure these satisfy your customer’s needs from all sides, such as providing appropriate information for the stages of your customer’s journeys and visuals that inspire curiosity.
- Set your brand’s performance goals and measure key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Follow up and monitor those KPIs regularly to ensure you can act quickly on any negative or positive news.
Experiential Marketing Results
When executed well, experiential marketing leads to an expanded relationship between a brand and the customer that enables every one of the customer’s interactions with that brand. Some other powerful effects come from experiential marketing.
- A relatively high ROI: If your brand takes part in a large-scale event with thousands of people in attendance, such as a fair, convention, or concert, you will likely see a lot of interactions and even acquire new customers. For example, spending $5,000 on booth rental and production of print materials like banners and brochures for a huge convention often leads to multiples of that in new revenue.
- More customer testing: Some of the best experiential marketing settings encourage customers or users of a brand to use your product. This tactile interaction is a major driver for creating memory and emotional connection to your brand. While big events increase the sheer number of these interactions, you will find that smaller events encourage deeper, more meaningful brand/customer connections.
- Improved brand recognition: it can be extremely helpful to use experiential marketing as a prime opportunity to get your product in front of as many people as possible.
- Buzz building: Often, going hand-in-hand with brand recognition is the process of building buzz among your audience. Both existing customers and potential customers can be affected by experiential marketing in a way that increases their excitement for a brand’s products, both old and new. This buzz can grow and extend to a wider customer base.
- Improved connection: This comes down to a “believability quotient.” When customers see and experience your product firsthand (or even hear about it from a trusted source), they are far more likely to retain positive feelings about your brand. This will translate into more positive messages and reviews and higher sales.
How Can SpeedPro Help With Your Experiential Marketing?
Effective experiential marketing combines good planning that maps the journey you want your audience to take and high-quality materials to accompany that journey.
SpeedPro can take your brand designs and turn them into:
- Posters, cardboard cutouts/standees for standing, or easel displays at trade shows, conferences, meetings, and similar industry events.
- Custom marketing flags can offer highly visible lightweight products that are mobile and attention-grabbing and fit any indoor or outdoor environment.
- Photomural graphics – wall graphics and murals provide a dynamic, seamless presentation of your marketing message.
- Custom vinyl banners – help celebrate milestones and achievements, promote events, brand a school campus, advertise products, and more.
- Pop-up/portable exhibits provide a quick way to get your message to your audience.
- Step and repeat banners are backdrops that help showcase your business logo and information while representing your brand colors.
- Event graphics do their best work at tradeshows, expos, and events to showcase your products and services in eye-catching, engaging graphics both for B2B and B2C.
- Custom tabletop displays communicate the essential essence of your brand and capture attention.
- Posters, cardboard cutouts/standees for standing, or easel displays at trade shows, conferences,
meetings, and similar industry events. - Backlit displays connect with consumers day or night to promote your business message.
- Point-of-purchase (POP) displays can align with your business’s brand imagery and personality and can sway purchasing behavior to boost sales with style.
…and much, much more!
SpeedPro can help you provide various materials that feature your designs and pass the intended cognitive, emotional, and sensory values to your customers or audience. High-quality large format prints give your experiential marketing and brand the weight and perceived value it deserves.