Experiential marketing is another one of those marketing terms that tend to get cast to the side a little bit and it is understandable. There are so many different marketing terms out there, a lot of them do tend to cross over with one another and experiential marketing does sound like one of those terms that some marketer created because they didn’t like the term event marketing or they didn’t like the term brand experience but experiential marketing is its tactic and it’s a legitimate tactic that you can take into your marketing strategy so that you can put your brand on the map.
What is Experiential Marketing?
It’s a form of unique marketing that allows the brand to engage with the audience in a way they wouldn’t normally do. These experiences could be a pop-up Kiosk or a test drive with a limited edition car or an interactive billboard or some way that the audience can engage with the brand in a truly unique way. The impact that this has is it leaves a long-lasting impression on the person in that experience and it is shown to drive brand loyalty and brand awareness. If you pull it off correctly then you can earn media exposure as well. You can earn some PR to go with that. It is an effective way to drive brand awareness and to raise the profile of your brand if you can come up with a creative way to give your audience a unique experience.
Why Use Experiential Marketing?
The first reason to use experiential marketing is to get attention. You’re doing something completely out of the ordinary, something left of center and what that does is it provides a sense of uniqueness that provides that real sense of novelty to the audience that they haven’t seen before. They haven’t engaged with a brand in a way like this before and that leaves a long-lasting impression that will keep the brand top of mind for a long time. The other reason that you would use experiential branding is to create an experience that will align with the position that you want to own in the mind of your audience. Let’s say you have a brand that you want to align with energy then you might create a brand experience or an experiential marketing campaign where you can give that audience some kind of the hit of adrenaline. That is how you would align your brand with that feeling and with that experience and help to solidify that position in the mind of your audience that you are a brand that is aligned with this term.
What Makes Experiential Marketing Effective?
It gives us that human connection that we crave. We’re always looking for human connection whether it’s with other people or it’s with the brands that we do business with. 74% of consumers said that if they had a unique experience with a brand that they would be far more likely to engage in that brand. That is one of the reasons that it is so effective and if you think about how we share with other people, we tend to share experiences that we’ve had in our lives, our friends and families, and if you have a unique experience with a brand you’re far more likely to share that experience with somebody else let’s say sharing an experience about an advertisement that you saw that is one of the unique angles of experiential marketing that evolves from this experience itself. People go on to tell their friends and family about it and that’s then picked up by the media, might be picked up by TV or Radio or newspaper and that gives you that added exposure.
Is it Experiential Marketing or Experiential Branding?
The most common term is an experiential marketing and that’s all about gaining attention. It’s all about giving potential customers a unique experience. They position the brand in a very unique position in their mind and they associate with that brand with a particular experience but it can also be within the realm of branding as well maybe post-sale. You might have an on-boarding process that will give your audience a unique experience that will make them feel glad that they chose this brand that might be in a form of a unique email or handwritten letter or something to give them that sense of novelty that they are experiencing something truly unique and that ties into the whole brand experience and the experience that you want your audience to have with your brand. It’s both experiential marketing and experiential branding.
How to Use Experiential Marketing?
Experiential marketing can be astronomically expensive and I don’t use that word lightly. I’ll show you in the example next exactly what I’m talking about there but it doesn’t have to be that expensive and involve big budgets. If you set your goal as giving your audience or customers a unique experience that they will remember your brand by then that is what you want to achieve with experiential marketing. Think about your audience, the experience that you want your brand aligned with, and think about how you can give your audience an experience like that.
Experiential Marketing Examples
Back in 2012, Red Bull ran an experiential marketing campaign called Stratus where they sent an Austrian Skydiver up to the edge of the atmosphere and got him to jump from a balloon and broke the world record. This was an example of an experiential marketing campaign. There was nothing physical or tangible about the campaign that the consumer experienced but 8million people watched this live through the various streaming channels that Red Bull had and what it did was it created massive PR and massive media exposure. Although 8million people watched it live they had over 200 million views and in the next 6 months sales rose by over 7%. This is a perfect example of how experiential marketing becomes experiential branding. It’s all about leaving a unique memory in the mind of the audience and that memory is part of the experience and that experience is linked to the position that the brand wants to own. The position that the brand wants to own in this case is extreme. Red Bull owned the word extreme in the minds of their audience and those 8million people who watch that live will remember that moment for the rest of their lives. It goes to show impactful experiential branding can be.
Small businesses don’t have a budget to send people into space but they don’t have to. Remember what I said before it’s all about giving your audience a unique experience and that experience should align with how you want them to feel about your brand. The more creative you get with this the more chance you have of leaving a truly unique impact and a truly unique memory in the mind of your audience. Forget about a big budget for a second. It’s all about putting yourself into the shoes of your customer and understanding what experience you want them to have and what image you want them to align with your brand and coming up with a creative way to give them that experience so they will remember you and align your brand with that memory.
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