We live in a time where brands are starting to invest much more energy and resources in the brand experience. Social media have also geared people more towards experiences and sharing those experiences. And let’s be real, we all enjoy great experiences that we can share with our friends.
Experiential marketing is powerful and effective for businesses because consumers can interact and immerse themselves in the brand experience. It also creates word-of-mouth advertising, increases social engagements from consumers sharing their experience, and it forces brands to get creative in creating new experiences for their customers.
Now let’s get into what experiential marketing is and expand on how it can be such a powerful tool for businesses, especially in the times we are living in today.
What Is Experiential Marketing
Experiential marketing is a marketing technique through which brands create situations where people can interact and experience the brand directly. This would include things like events, product launches, publicity stunts, product sampling, etc.
So here are at least 5 reasons why experiential marketing is so powerful for businesses today and why every business owner should work on incorporating it into their marketing plans.
Why Is Experiential Marketing So Powerful?
Now that we’ve covered what experiential marketing is, let’s take a look at 5 reasons why it is so powerful for business.
It’s Very Effective
There’s no denying that it is an extremely effective form of marketing if done correctly. Many studies have shown that people respond better to the experience of a brand than any other traditional form of advertising and increase their likelihood of buying the products or services.
People are much more likely to buy a product in a situation where they can experience or test a product or service. Product sampling is simply a great way to get people to buy your product.
It’s also very effective when it comes to brand perception. The majority of people who have been immersed in a brand experience through the brand’s experiential marketing campaigns, have positively increased or positively changed their perception of that brand.
There are also great examples of experiential marketing campaigns that have been very successful for many brands and in some cases, you can see the direct effect that these campaigns had on their sales numbers and businesses.
Creates an Immersive Brand Experience
The majority of immersive brand experiences lead to favorable brand perception and/or sales. People like to experience things before they commit. Other people who might not ever have considered to buy a product, might commit to buying it after an immersive experience of the brand.
As an example, you might find that something who would never consider buying an EV, might go out and buy one after they had to look after a friend’s Tesla while they were away on holiday or something.
Tesla is a great example of a company that utilizes experiential marketing very effectively. The latest Cybertruck event was just the ultimate immersive brand experience. Just the flood of personal YouTube reviews, thoughts, comments and experiences that were shared by people who all attended the event is just astounding.
Aside from the broken glass, which can be argued whether it was great publicity or not, but publicity nonetheless.
Word of Mouth Advertising
If you create a good brand experience for people who interact with your brand, they will talk about it and share their experiences with their friends and others. Word of mouth is very powerful in our world today, even more than ever before.
A big amount of marketing around your brand is the kind of marketing that you have little control over. That includes word of mouth. This is particularly signified in the concept of viral trends. We can all remember the Red Bull live-streamed “Stratos” event. Red Bull partnered with Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian skydiver, for the highest skydive ever and thereby setting a world record.
The live stream on YouTube had over 8 million viewers that tuned in to see it live, which at the time broke all the records and was the most viewed live stream event ever. This is a great example of a stunt that simultaneously provided an impressive and immersive brand experience of showcasing the extreme sport nature of Red Bull.
You can check out the event below.
Social Engagement
People are constantly sharing the things they do on their social media platforms. Brands can use an experiential marketing campaign to create a unique experience for consumers to share. If you create an experience worth sharing, people will share it in large numbers and your reach as a brand can be huge from a single event.
Giving out free merchandise or products in exchange for emails or social shares etc can be a great way to encourage more engagement.
Allows Brands To Get Creative
Although there are so many examples of successful experiential marketing campaigns that have been done in the past, this marketing technique forces brands to sometimes think outside of the box and come up with something really unique to get, peak, and keep the interest of potential customers.
There’s nothing better than brands pushing their marketing to the limits to create something really unique, venture into uncharted territory and totally nailing it!
How can the success of experiential marketing be measured?
Measuring experiential marketing campaigns are not easy to do since so much of it is subjective to the individual customers’ experiences. However, here are a few ways of doing so, depending on the motivation behind the campaign, ex. to generate leads, increase brand awareness, or increase sales (directly).
Lead Generation
Let’s start with how we can measure the success of an experiential marketing campaign aimed at generating leads.
- Engagements. The most obvious one, but you can measure the number of engagements each of your sales representatives had you had during the event.
- Conversions. You can then measure how many of those engagements turned into leads in terms of phone numbers or email addresses collected from the engagements. The conversion ratio (percentage of engagements that led to conversions) is also an important metric to measure the event’s overall success.
Brand Awareness
Now let’s look at how we can measure an experiential marketing campaign’s success if you aimed to increase your brand awareness. This one is a little bit harder to measure because the event itself doesn’t produce the results in real-time the same way leads do with email addresses and phone numbers.
- Brand sentiment. You can give out some surveys at the event to get an idea of how people view the brand, the products or services, the event itself, and the general sentiment they have about the brand.
- Brand awareness. You can measure brand awareness before the event and after, to determine how much impact the event made on your brand awareness with a specific demographic, area, etc., depending on what metrics are important to your business. This is particularly important if you aim to break into a new market or appeal to a different demographic.
- Social buzz. This is by far the easiest one to measure and a great metric for determining your experiential marketing campaign’s success, tracking the social buzz that the event created during and after the event. Impressions, likes, mentions, shares, tags, etc., are things you can measure and collect data on to analyze.
Sales
At the beginning of this section, I mentioned sales and put “direct” in brackets because, technically, all marketing activities eventually lead to an increase in sales one way or another. When it comes to increasing sales as your experiential marketing campaign’s primary aim, we’re talking about direct sales from the event or immediately after.
- Sales. As I mentioned, you would look at your sales before the event and then after the event to see what impact the event had.
- Samples. You can measure the number of products sampled during the event, which, although it does not directly lead to sales, is a measure of the number of potential new customers exposed to your products or services.
- Customers. You can measure the number of new customers who bought your products and the number of returning customers to access the increase in both after the event compared to before the event.
Conclusion
In a world where anything can simply go viral online and put brands on the map, literally overnight, the concept of experiential marketing has a much bigger role to play in the companies’ marketing mix.
The days of print, radio and even TV ads are slowing fading away in the distance and making way for experiences.
Experiential marketing is a very powerful tool for strengthening your brand promise, strengthening bonds with your loyal customers and simultaneously attracting new customers to your brand and forging new relationships with them, increasing the potential for them to become loyal engagers with your brand.
