What experiential marketing is and how it can help your business

Whatever size your business, exploring new ways to reach and engage with your audience is a vital part of growth and marketing strategy. Whilst traditional approaches to marketing offer easier to track metrics and a much clearer way to analyse return on investment, the high level of competition and saturation online and in media advertising can make it difficult to think of innovative ways to attract attention to your brand.

What is experiential marketing?

Traditional marketing has a focus on letting consumers know what services and products are available, but allowing consumers to engage with and experience a company or product is challenging. Experiential marketing offers consumers the chance to try out a service, experience a product or engage directly with a brand. This can be achieved through a number of different techniques and, when successful, creates strong and unique brand association.

What are the benefits?

Gaining awareness of your services or products can prove difficult in a crowded marketplace. Almost all companies today have an internet presence including an informational or e-commerce website as well as social media accounts and online marketing strategies. Experiential marketing provides a fantastic opportunity to extend awareness beyond your traditional audiences. It achieves this not only with consumers who actively take part but by the social media posts and shares created as a result.

Fun and inventive experiential marketing can also create a unique type of brand association and sentiment that is almost impossible to achieve through more traditional marketing means. A great experience shows consumers a more tangible account of your company identity. This happens through associations they’ve made themselves rather than an image promoted through traditional channels.

How can it be done?

Some of the largest brands in the world have created memorable and innovative experiential marketing campaigns with huge public installations and celebrity involvement. With experiential marketing, this isn’t necessary for a successful campaign.

Experiential marketing can be done and yield great results on a smaller scale, with the success of campaigns lying in an engaging idea that ties in with your brand or product. For physical businesses such as bars or restaurants, tutorials and classes on how to make their food or drink can be a really popular way to raise awareness. One example is an open day showing how a cocktail bar makes a signature cocktail with consumers trying it for themselves and sharing out the samples afterwards. It helps your business shows a sense of fun, show off your products and can create local awareness.

Another example of experiential marketing with a focus on social media is the use of green screen video and photography. We’re definitely in the age of the selfie with 52,000,000 images uploaded to Instagram every day and this means that creating shareable branded images is an ideal way for customers to engage whilst raising awareness for your business. With a huge range of options for background imagery and themes, green screen video and photos allows you to capitalise on latest trends or attention grabbing events whilst your audience interacts with your brand. They’ll not only take away the experience but brand association as well as the souvenir photo or video.

Whilst these are just two examples of how experiential marketing can be executed, it’s safe to say the possibilities for ideas are endless. No matter what industry your business is in, a creative experiential marketing idea has the potential to offer you new exposure and fantastic results when executed well. As a powerful method of attracting interest and interaction to your business in a different way, it offers a fresh approach that you should consider making a part of your business marketing strategy.