6 Reasons To Invest in Experiential Marketing

Why experiential, and is now the time? 

Most brands are invested in digital and social marketing efforts, for good reason – it’s where people spend a vast amount of their time.  But the result is information overload and a limited capacity for any customer to be truly loyal to any one brand.  Millennials are the ever-more-influential and desired demographic, and experiential campaigns compliment digital strategies by appealing to the emotional, tactile, and physiological needs of customers, ensuring that you are reaching people in all aspects of their daily life.

What is experiential marketing?  

I’m going to go ahead and quote a recent article I stumbled across last week by Benjamin Speigel.  Not only is this a remarkably concise overview, but it showcases the invaluable nature of what experiential has to offer for both the brand and consumer.  

Experiential marketing is about enabling personal connections between brands and consumers by creating real-life experiences that are worth sharing.  These experiences combine digital and real-world connections to create stronger memories and emotional bonds between brands and consumers.

What should I look for in an agency partner?

Now that you’ve decided that it’s time to invest in experiential marketing as part of your larger brand strategy, it’s worth considering what you want to get out of the agency who you’ve tasked with designing and executing your next campaign.  

A great experiential marketing campaign combines strategy, clear vision, trust, creative foresight, a targeted audience and the capacity to integrate seamlessly into your digital and social marketing efforts.  Let’s review:  

Strategy.  A successful experiential marketing campaign is viewed as part of a much larger, holistic, and wholly integrated strategy, with analytics and reporting to help you understand the benefits of your investment.  A strong agency will help you see that experiential is not a check on your marketing to-do list, but rather a valuable means to gaining and improving customer loyalty through unexpected and often remarkable experiences.  

Research.  An effective campaign requires a detailed understanding of your target market.  It’s critical that your agency work alongside your team to augment your own perspective on your customers and how they will, or won’t, engage with any ideas that come to the table.  

Integration.  Don’t place your experiential in a strategy silo.  A successful and impactful campaign will reach all touchpoints, with your brand story amplified across all platforms in both the physical and digital world.  

Trust the Creative.  The beauty of experiential is that there really are no creative limits.  Cultivating trust with your agency partner will ensure an open flow of communication and the generation of break through ideas.