Experiential Marketing Campaigns to Build the Ultimate Brand Experience
These days, you can find just about everything you want online to pass the time. Standing out among all this content can be tough, blogger outreach case studies have shown just how important online marketing is for companies today, however some brands are taking their content offline in the form of experiential marketing.
The idea is that “you had to be there” to truly experience the event, something that could not possibly be communicated over a screen. These experiences build buzz and can turn a brand into an almost-mythical creature, one that you have to interact with, person-to-person, to truly appreciate. If you’re currently planning the next event for your brand and another firm has sorted lighting and audio, you definitely need to consider how else you can ensure you are going to effectively engage your target audience.
While experiential marketing stunts can generate plenty of hype, what people may not realize is all the surrounding work that goes into them. A company may have a unique trade show booth design in Las Vegas for a big convention, for instance, but they also have PR campaigns, guerilla marketing teams, and tons of follow-up marketing campaigns to support it. All amplify the experiential campaign, making it larger than life by giving the campaign a much larger footprint.
To have a truly successful campaign, you have to adopt this strategy. You can use the following process to start it right, build hype and follow up to make the biggest impact possible.
Step 1: Lay the Groundwork
Experiential marketing events should be something worth getting excited about, and nothing builds anticipation quite like curiosity. You can tap into this energy using hints delivered through a basic PR and promotional campaign. Leave clues through social media that people can pore through, and ask vague questions like: “Are you excited for what’s to come?”
Eventually, you can trickle out details of the campaign in order to get people focused while still keeping them guessing. Best of all, engagement during this stage of the campaign can teach you what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to optimize your approach before you have made any concrete promises.
Step 2: Target Priority Markets
Your next step is to research your biggest markets and then to send out brand representatives for a taste of the campaign. This stage can consist of a full-blown marketing tour, like how toymaker Mattel Canada let people sample their ultra-powerful BOOMco. line of dart guns. You can also simply set up a booth in a public space or have individuals hitting the streets giving away swag.
Your ultimate aim is to tease the upcoming experiential event to get both consumers and others in the industry excited about what is to come.
Step 3: Broadcast Your Experiential Marketing Event on the Street
When it comes time to actually hold your marketing event, have guerilla marketing street teams mill about the area around your event in order to encourage people to come visit the experience. These teams help increase your reach beyond the location your experience will be found at while giving your brand a human face at the grassroots level.
Step 4: Stake Your Claim in Town
During big events like conventions and festivals, it has become popular to set up a separate “pop-up” shop that can provide a completely branded experience for excited attendees and loyal fans.
Sometimes, your pop-up location can be a secondary component of your marketing goals while the convention hosts the actual experiential event. Other times, the pop-up can host the main event itself. Video game publisher Electronic Arts has taken this approach to the extreme by hosting a separate event during the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) rather than hosting a booth on the actual convention floor.
Step 5: Follow-Up With Marketing Assets
Every experiential event is just a small sliver of the overall marketing campaign. When Bacardi toured the U.S. with a mobile house party on wheels, the company used footage of the events to create promotional pre-rolls and to inspire campaigns all built around the experience.
If you are interested in building a trade show booth that can reinforce your experiential marketing event or perhaps even help host it, then you can work with a capable trade show booth builder in Las Vegas to give you the custom, one-of-a-kind experience that will have people talking about it for months.
