MA58 Engage your audience with experiential marketing
MARKETING

ENGAGE YOUR AUDIENCE WITH EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING

By Amy Purdon • November/December 2017 • Issue 58

What is experiential marketing and, more importantly, how can you use it to reinforce your brand presence?

As new-fangled as it may sound, experiential marketing is more than just the latest buzzword in marketing; it is the result of the natural evolution of brand identity marketing. In fact, the base concept that underlies experiential marketing has been around for a long time. It all comes down to living your brand values and helping customers to experience your ‘why’, and as with all great strategies, it is quite simple. 

EXPERIENTIAL MARKETING IN A NUTSHELL
As the name suggests, experiential marketing is simply ‘experience marketing’. It is a form of engagement marketing — in-person, event-oriented, P2P (person to person) marketing — that allows consumers to experience your brand values firsthand and to become immersed in your brand identity. 
Experiential marketing is tactile messaging that audiences can physically touch, hear, see and feel. 

Instead of broadcasting a message to the world in the hope that they will interact with it, you are interacting with potential customers on a human level, in real time and in a tangible way. While this might sound like the old-fashioned supermarket cheese sample table, there is one distinct difference — experiential marketing works with your brand values, rather than your product. 

Experiential marketing’s uniquely comprehensive approach uses a tangible, offline experience to drive a loud online dialogue. As opposed to offering free samples (which, admittedly, does sometimes work), brands are using their brand purpose as marketing material and occasionally the product itself doesn’t even feature in the marketing. It is what we call fully integrated, holistic, marketing. Marketers across the globe are having a lot of fun with it and it’s working for them.

CAMPAIGNS THAT ROCKED
Lean Cuisine
In New York City, the weight loss company Lean Cuisine hosted an experiential campaign called #WeighThis. The campaign centred on weight loss without any of the standard, soul destroying ‘change yourself if you want to be happy’ or ‘loose the flab’ messaging.

The campaign entailed a gallery of scales in Grand Central Station where women were invited to ‘weigh in’, but instead of being real scales that measure mass, the scales were boards where women were encouraged to write down how they really wanted to be 'weighed'. This positive tactic allowed women to express their desire to be weighed by their accomplishments; like the fact that they were 55 and back at college or that they cared for 200 homeless children every day.

Women walked away from the ‘weigh in’ feeling proud of who they are. The campaign created a huge online conversation and established the brand as one that cares about people, not just their aesthetics. The product itself never came into play and yet they were able to create an interactive experience that said, “Okay, we make a product that fits into a healthy lifestyle, but your accomplishments matter more than the number on the scale. It's all about you.”
Lean Cuisine achieved over 204 million impressions for the #WeighThis campaign.

Zappos Cupcake Ambush
We love this one, it has cupcakes in it! Armed with a cupcake truck and a new photo app to promote, Google teamed up with Zappos and took to the streets of Texas for this one. To qualify for a free cupcake, people had to take a photo of it with the app which they had to download. Then, as if free cake isn’t enough, Zappos ‘ambushed’ the Google cupcake truck with its own experience — a box-on-feet which, when fed the Google cupcake, would produce a container with a watch or a pair of shoes in it. Imagine how epic that was!

So here we have a great example of not only experiential marketing, but experiential affiliate marketing, too. Choosing the right company with which to engage in a bit of co-branding can help you both make a bigger splash.

ADVANTAGES FOR YOUR BRAND
According to statistics published in the Event Track 2016 report, 49 percent of people attending branded events make and share mobile videos of their experience. Roughly 40 percent of these will be published on social media with a hashtag and a tag to your brand.

The long and short of it is this: The people who experience your brand do your marketing for you. If you ensure that people enjoy a truly positive brand experience that is aligned with your brand purpose, you have the opportunity to skip the first three stages of the inbound marketing funnel — the awareness stage, consideration stage and decision-making stage — and proceed straight to the ‘promoter’ stage and collect your R200! Okay, well, hopefully a lot more than that in the long run.

The point is that someone who has had a positive brand experience will become one of your most valuable assets — a happy consumer who loves your brand and is willing to share it with their peers.
Experiential marketing opportunities are a powerful way to boost your inbound marketing efforts. It all comes down to the same thing — communicating your brand purpose effectively to build trust and create positive brand stories that your audience can relate to. 

BEST PRACTICES
  • Know yourself. You must define your brand purpose, also referred to as your ‘true North’, before you can communicate it to anyone else.
  • Don’t shove it in their face — intrigue your market and let them come to you.
  • Align your brand experience efforts with your brand purpose. They should speak directly to your audience, in their own language.
  • Remember that even if you’re a B2B (business-to-business) company, you are ultimately still speaking to real people.
  • Be prepared — this is a great opportunity to create social content. Make sure the camera is charged and your social media team is standing by to respond to your audience.
  • Define your hashtag, but do your homework — you want it to be unique to your campaign.
  • Local is lekker. There is nothing wrong with running localised campaigns — the story can still spread far and wide.
  • Don’t be afraid to team up with an affiliate. Complimentary brands can do a lot for each other.
  • Get people talking about you. It’s not always safe to play it safe. Sometimes you have to go a little over the edge of your marketing comfort zone.
  • Do try not to be offensive.
  • Last, but not least, have fun!
People don't just want to know about your brand, they want to experience it — to feel it, taste it, smell it and make it a part of their own story. Experiential marketing is a way of communicating these things to your audience in a tangible and highly effective way.

Sources: http://www.eventmarketer.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/2016EventTrackExecSummary.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1I_hFwzOYA
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