Experiential Marketing: Here’s why it’s so great at engaging audiences

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that in the pursuit of trying to find creative ways to appeal to and stand out to their target audience that some businesses create marketing campaigns involving physical interactive experiences as part of promoting their products. You might recall encountering something like a taste-test pop-up kiosk, excited at nabbing a tasty bite of free food, or perhaps finding yourself fiddling around with a bolted-down demo smartphone at a tech store. These are some of the simple forms of what’s called experiential marketing. The focus is to offer the target audience an immersive and more personal experience through in-person or virtual interactions. Compared to traditional advertising, such kind of activities can present as considerably more unique, memorable, and impactful, and thus more meaningful to audiences.

Getting your audience involved

Much like how people form relationships with each other, individuals also form relationships with brands that they interact with. A brand that one knows of, while knowing little about them but without negative feelings towards them, might be regarded as an acquaintance of sorts. However, not until spending a bit of time together might they become friends. Experiential marketing is a bit of shortcut in this sense, bringing a brand and an individual together through a more bonded experience, rather than the individual only being mildly aware of a brand from being exposed to a one-way message, a more surface-level interaction which characterises the majority of marketing messages that one typically receives on a daily basis.

Experiential marketing is also referred to as engagement marketing, and how it might engage an audience through a campaign might involve one or a combination of the following.

• Product demonstration / sampling: Giving your audience the opportunity to physically experience or test your product serves to strongly engage them, additionally providing them the utility of a substantive point of reference while comparing competitors’ offerings, which can help inform their decision-making to stimulate purchases or other actions.
• Live activity experience: There are many creative ways to offer a unique live experience. It might be an event, a workshop, or promotional popup installation that delivers a combination of knowledge and entertainment to your audience. To excite, inform, entertain, and/or surprise are some of goals that you might have in designing the activity, helping to produce a meaningful impression from which your audience can act upon in the future.
• Collaborations: Such as with a celebrity, influencer, dor another brand, creating an association that can leverage a pre-existing relationship that your audience might have with another entity already held in higher regard can produce a special and more meaningful experience for them.
• Augmented Reality experience: Strides in technology have enabled instant real-time overlaying of computer-generated content into 3D spaces. Currently still quite new to many people, AR functionality can create a virtual space for imaginative displays and interactions, which – until it becomes more widespread as a marketing tool – can be a unique and novel way to engage your audience.

Experiences have impact, and not only for your audience. A well-executed experiential marketing campaign can reap a number of benefits for your brand.

Improved awareness and memorability

This is a key objective of experiential marketing in it being a well-suited opportunity to make a strong positive impression on your audience. It is vital that your brand identity is clearly represented, doing so by extensively utilising visual elements such as your brand’s colours and logo to reinforce a link between your audience’s positive experience and their association of it with your brand, further retaining this to memory.

Differentiation from competitors

Experiential marketing campaigns tend to require extended efforts to formulate and execute, going beyond the more basic marketing that your competitors would be engaging in as standard. Examples such as letting your audience experience your product for free when competitors do not, or hosting an event that connects your audience with real people involved in your business, helps your brand to stand out distinct from competitors.

Heightened perceptions and loyalty

A strong impression goes further by consolidating perceptions of your audience that can then be harder for competitors to challenge through their own efforts. Moreover, appeal and familiarity contribute to a sense of connection and trust of a brand, and from this stem’s loyalty, ultimately building up reputation and contributing to your brand image. Of course, there’s always a risk of your audience’s experience being negative and having the opposite intended effect, meaning that experiential marketing campaigns warrant definitive investment to maximise their potential to be resounding successes.

Cross-channel promotion

A special activity or event that your brand is hosting is noteworthy. Across your different marketing channels, you should let your audience know what, where and when about any such experiential marketing activity, notifying them so that they can interact or participate in some way. During the activity itself, it should also promote those same channels that led particular segments of your audience to learn about it, such as your website or social media. The more cross-channel promotion, the more that your audience is likely to be exposed to more of your content. Encouraging your audience to share their experience on social media can extend your reach even further.

Gaining useful information from participants

Depending on the nature of the activity, there might be the chance to record headcounts, collect contact information, feedback, eor other kinds of responses from participants. This can be used to gain insights about participants’ behaviours, preferences, and perceptions to then inform your business decision-making and to refine your broader marketing strategy.

Greater reach through word-of-mouth conversation

Participating in a live activity can make for good conversation with friends. Having your audience promote your brand for you by word-of-mouth (potentially to those of a similar target demographic) is a desirable position to be in. This highlights why clear representation of your brand is so important when it comes to experiential marketing.

Incorporating some form of experiential marketing into your wider marketing strategy can shake up the conventional formula, especially through the eyes of your target audience. Individuals are constantly exposed to advertising and one-way marketing messages, but it is considerably less often that they are not just the receiver but an active participant, and with that comes a sense of empowerment and prompt to greater engagement.