We all remember those commercials that touched our hearts, made us laugh, or kept us in awe due to the sheer smarts behind their simplicity. Advertising and marketing firms have had to evolve extensively to keep audiences engaged. With the rise of digital marketing, it has become increasingly more difficult for brands to connect with their audiences in ways that truly move them. Experiential marketing is a way to create that connection, a bridge between brand and audience.
So, what is experiential marketing and why does it work?
Branded Experiences
Through the creation of unique, branded experiences, customers can be treated to an immersive event that allows them to participate fully in the brand and what it has to offer. Customers find it easier to connect to brands that think out of the box without straying too far from what customers appreciate. It’s more than finding unique opportunities to sell products or services, but rather allowing customers to experience the product, service, or brand itself.
What might seem like a clever and simple exchange will have goals and strategy behind it. There is an inextricable knowledge of the customer required, ensuring that the experience matches their interests and answers to a need they may have.
Experiential Moments
Experiential marketing reaches quite far and wide across a number of “applications”. We use the word applications loosely because it’s difficult to package the different avenues that work with experiential marketing. If you can think of different ways that customers connect with brands in dynamic ways, you’re probably thinking of an experiential event. Here are some examples:
- A live music event driven by a brand
- A food sampling event inside a retail store
- A flash mob in an inner city where a product or brand is the focus
- An installation at an exhibition where customers or passers-by get to engage in some kind of activity
- A live event
- A webinar
- An activation inside a boutique
There are so many ways to spin it, and there are equally, as many ways to expand on what you can do with experiential marketing. This is one of the aspects that make it such a fun marketing method to work with. It’s swapping out the tried and tested traditional marketing methods and replacing them with something that evokes emotion in a more tangible way.
Why Is Experiential Effective?
As per an EventTrack research report that was conducted in 2021, 40% of consumers felt more loyalty to a brand after participating in a brand experience. In addition to that, 91% said they would be more inclined to purchase the product or service after said experience.
That alone is enough to convince any brand to put on their creative thinking caps and start rolling out experiential marketing campaigns, but there’s more to it than that. People want to feel. They want to emote. They want to experience life in a more dimensional way.
We live in a world where there is a fine line between our reality and the harshness of the world. As people, we all have a responsibility to do better by one another, and this can be extended to brands and businesses. If we put a little more effort into having fun, creating exciting ways to experience our days, and… dare we say it… more inventive ways to sell products, at least we can make light of days we have on this planet. At least we will have more opportunities to feel.
