Now, that I’ve officially rebranded my marketing consultancy as an experiential marketing agency, there’s one question that keeps coming up:
What is experiential marketing?
And it’s a good question. After all, experiential marketing is a fairly new way of looking at marketing and it’s making a big difference for companies of all kinds.
Here’s the lowdown on experiential marketing from what it is to what it can do for you:
Experiential marketing companies create experiences that strengthen the connection between brands and consumers. Specifically, experiential marketing is about creating connections, experiences and interactions that are meaningful enough to target audiences to make their investment of energy, time, money and attention in the brand worthwhile.
What is a meaningful connection, experience or interaction?
Quite simply, it’s one that is unique, unforgettable and relevant – that introduces and showcases the brand in an engaging, cohesive and substantive way.
At Evolution’s own launch event, we introduced and showcased our brand through seven experiences that enabled to our attendees to engage at a sensory level. Here are just a few of them:
Sip was a create your own mimosa bar to tantalize your taste buds. Our guests could make their own mimosas by selecting their juices and fruit garnishes then top it off with a little champagne. We took it one step further by creating cute name tags that were tied to all of the glasses with words on them that we’d like associated with our brand.
We also created an interactive and visual gallery area called, Explore, to showcase several of our past projects and events to our guests. The area included an iPad kiosk, which allowed our guests to check out our new Website and social media pages.
So, from our own example you can see that experiential marketing, at it’s best, is about creating a holistic, multi-level experience of a brand – of making the brand come to life for consumers. When experiential marketing engages all the consumer’s senses, it reinforces the brand’s story more deeply and forwards the relationship between brand and consumer exponentially by encouraging an active dialogue.
There’s no doubt that experiential marketing makes sense from a logical standpoint in that deeper interaction obviously leads to deeper engagement and loyalty. But the critical question is: How do you measure the success of your experiential marketing program? Next time, we’ll cover a few of the ways to measure consumer engagement at various touch points throughout your experiential marketing program.
Until next time – dive deep!
Wendy McAllister