To make your brand stand out with a memorable message, new and exciting methods of appealing to your customers can go a long way with your promotional efforts. While traditional advertising methods are effective, creating a new experience entirely through experiential marketing can really make a difference in standing out from your competitors. In this blog, we cover what experiential marketing is and how it can be used to your business’ advantage.
What Is Experiential Marketing?
Experiential marketing involves creating a physical, interactive experience for your customers to produce a memorable marketing campaign. While traditional marketing in the form of billboards, flyers, and TV advertisements is effective as a passive method, experiential marketing can really make a lasting impression as a result of its unique, alternative approach.
There is no one set manner of experiential marketing, though it usually involves a live element and some form of interactive, hands-on experience. Some common types of experiential marketing include brand activations, pop-up shops, immersive installations, virtual/augmented reality experiences, demonstrations, and much more.
The more creative your campaign is and the more uniquely it portrays its message, the more likely it is that your customer base will remember it and your brand.
Why Is Experiential Marketing Worth Considering?
Experiential marketing is about creating a new and unique experience for customers to portray your brand in a new manner. With an in-person, interactive campaign, you can create a fun, thrilling, and genuinely memorable experience that your customers won’t have through traditional methods. With a unique method such as experiential marketing, there are many benefits for your business, including:
- Face-to-face contact with customers: Though it is possible to get customer feedback through emails and social media, it’s much more worthwhile to get an impression of your customers’ reaction through experiential marketing. This way, you can gain insight into their response to your brand and their thoughts through a face-to-face, two-way conversation.
- Building brand loyalty: Through creating memories and positive associations with your brand, experiential marketing can go a long way in building brand loyalty with customers.
- Social media and PR buzz: If your experiential marketing campaign is a success, your audience will spread word-of-mouth promotion about the experience and your business. Thereby, your brand will benefit from user-generated content and may even pick up the attention of news outlets for further promotion.
- Setting you apart from the competition: If your marketing efforts are at risk of being similar to your competitors’, an experiential marketing campaign can make your brand stand out with a unique experience and association with your brand.
Key Considerations for an Experiential Marketing Campaign
So, how do you get started with carrying out a successful experiential marketing campaign? We’ve put together our best tips below to get you started in carrying out the best campaign possible:
- Establishing your goals: Start by outlining the message of your campaign, who you are trying to reach, and what you aim to achieve with it. These aspects will underpin the entirety of your campaign
- Brainstorming a memorable campaign: Experiential marketing is a highly effective marketing strategy, but only if your message is clear and genuinely connects with your customers. Ensure that your marketing campaign is unique, memorable, relevant to your brand, and goes beyond the nature of standard advertisements. Also, make sure that you have given thought to how you will promote your campaign to increase its reach.
- Plan the logistics: Once your idea is set in stone, then comes working out how to practically launch it and the resources you’ll need. Be sure to consider all aspects, including staffing, software, product and brand materials, and budget.
- Finding the perfect venue: Launching your campaign in an area that has a high footfall and best reaches your target demographic is a key consideration. By using our Venue Locator, you can easily find venues that match your requirements to ensure your campaign’s success.
- Measuring results: Give thought to how you will measure your campaign’s success, whether this is in the form of new sign-ups, social media mentions, leads generated, or something else that accurately measures the success of your goals.
Access Point and Experiential Marketing: UNICEF
At Access Point, we have a wealth of experience in helping experiential marketing campaigns come to life. For example, we worked with Together Fundraising and UNICEF to provide them the promotional space to launch their campaign that raised awareness of the Syrian refugee crisis. We were able to get the campaign across 10 highly visible shopping centres throughout the UK, providing our clients with the space they needed to ensure their campaign was successful.
This experience allowed customers to experience through a virtual reality headset what life is like for a child in a Syrian refugee camp. Through this, UNICEF and Together Fundraising were able to effectively communicate their message to the public, raise awareness of their cause, and obtain many monthly donors. Resultingly, the campaign raised £155,220 for UNICEF UK, as tracked by the number of donors.
To find out more, take a look at our UNICEF case study in full detail.
Experiential marketing at Access Point
As with UNICEF, you can also effectively target your customers through an experiential marketing campaign. By creating a memorable experience unlike your competitors and creating a message that genuinely resonates with your audience, this marketing method could be significantly effective for your business.
To get your experiential marketing campaign off the ground, we are here to help. At Access Point, we have vast experience in helping many brands to launch their campaigns in spaces that will most benefit them. With our large and diverse client list and a team of highly skilled professionals to help you along the way, we can make your vision come to life.
If you have any questions as to how we can help facilitate your campaign in areas with high footfall, or if you have a space that you wish to hire out for marketing, get in touch with us today. A member of our team will be more than happy to discuss your best options.
