Your Success is Customers Experience – How Experiential Marketing can Elevate your Brand
Businesses should want to get to know their customers through face-to-face interactions and give them a sense of acceptance, importance, and belonging. These interactions solidify customer loyalty and overall increase sales, revenue, and brand awareness, and what better way to do this than by adding Experiential Marketing to your strategy!
While the name might imply something out of place for a marketing strategy, but it has other names like “event marketing”, or “special events”. It’s a way to create an interactive and innovative environment to engage directly with your loyal customers while positively benefitting your company.
What are the benefits?
We already know promotional events for businesses have their benefits, but what experiential marketing does is keep your company at the forefront of the consumers’ minds. You want the consumer to “experience” the brand (hence the name!) and convert them to faithful, loyal customers, all while never forgetting that interaction. And this is a major task considering we interact with thousands of companies and products on a daily basis.
The best part? Experiential marketing is for both Business-to-Business AND Business-to-Consumer with no business being too big or too small to have an experiential marketing effort added into their strategy!
What can Experiential Marketing look like today?
An experiential marketing strategy includes adding events such as activities at trade shows, retreats, kiosks, pop-up stores, and more into your promoting efforts. Creating a branded environment for interactions is extremely beneficial to any company in any industry, but as we know things have changed in the past few years as most events since 2020 are going either fully online or a hybrid of in-person/online.
To show an in-person experience is, Epic Games had a location for their game Fortnite at the 2018 E3 convention. In the massive space, they included virtual interactions with characters, life-size in-game scenery, like a 38-foot battle bus, which gave fans and customers an immersive and unforgettable experience that they could connect to. Fans having the ability to be inside of the game is what experiential marketing is about; the experience of the product
Pandemic Aftermath
As for the virtual shift in experiential marketing, where it became planning and holding events in a virtual environment rather than a physical one, it’s become somewhat of a norm. For instance, Tomorrowland Around the World is Belgium’s electronic dance music festival and went virtual this past July, and took advantage of the new platform to deliver “never-before-seen musical experience[s]” for their loyal viewers, which you can catch a glimpse of on their youtube channel here.
But, not being restricted to a single location and instead being able to be viewed anywhere online is one of the major advantages virtual events have to offer. People who never had the chance to attend beforehand now have the ability to experience new things. Musicians, museums, conventions, networking events, and more are all reaching a newer, international audience.
Will it work for you?
Every industry in some way can benefit from experiential marketing, whether it’s tourism/travel, sports, fine arts, food and beverage, and everything in between. In an out-of-the-box way, you can get people to have an experience with the brand and end the day with your company in their head.
At James Ross, we have 30+ years on the job working on brand development, including innovative experiential marketing strategy formation and implementation! Contact us here, or reach out any time at hello@jamesrossadvertising.com and get started on an unforgettable experience for your customers!
