Below are 10 reasons that you should be utilizing experiential marketing to create and maintain brand vitality, build relevance and drive sales!
- Breaks Through the Clutter – It is harder than ever to grab consumer attention in this media driven world. Face-to-face experiential marketing breaks through the clutter of advertising messaging to engage your consumers. This helps to build brand relevance and breaks the status quo.
- Drives Sales – We know that experiential marketing programs have the power to not only create awareness and influence but are one of the strongest drivers of purchase intent. According to the Experiential Marketing Forum, when North Americans are asked what influences them to purchase brands they don’t normally purchase, the tactic having the greatest impact is experiential marketing, live, face-to-face programs. Check out Sales in a Slump? Turn to Experiential Marketing to Turn Profits to see how brand marketers have changed their objectives for experiential marketing programs in the past few years. Surveys show that brand managers are increasingly turning to experiential marketing to drive sales rather than just increasing awareness.
- Creates a Platform to Tell Your Brand Story – Face-to-face marketing gives brands the chance to have a meaningful one-on-one engagement with their consumers, and gives consumers the opportunity to fully experience the brand. This allows for a two-way conversation. Consumers get to share their opinions and let brands know what they like, what they don’t like and what they would like to see in the future. Brands are able to personalize the connection with each consumer to focus on what is important to each individual. This genuine experience goes a long way toward creating lifelong loyal customers.
- Brings Brands to Life – It’s critical for brands today to resonate with consumers. More than ever, marketers today must recognize that traditional, two-dimensional forms of promotion are not enough to move the needle. Marketers today must provide consumers a genuine brand experience to avoid becoming another commodity. To stay relevant, your brand must do more than just advertise on various “flat monitors.” You must move beyond the TV, the computer and the handheld screen. To stay truly relevant in an overstimulated world, you’ve got to get face-to-face with your consumers and provide a memorable experience.
- Builds Deep Emotional Connections – Would you like to create lifelong relationships with your customers? We have found that successful companies are able to do this by creating deep emotional connections with their customers. By building an emotional bond with your consumer you’re becoming a part of their life. Your customers will want to share their experience with your product with their friends and family. They’ll feel as if they are a part of your brand and that your brand really understands and fulfills their need. This is a tight relationship that isn’t easy to obtain.
- Generates Word-of-Mouth – If you aren’t getting word-of-mouth buzz about your brand, your marketing dollars aren’t working very efficiently or effectively. The most successful experiential marketing campaigns give people a reason to share with their friends and family. Remember that a strategic experiential marketing campaign can drive word-of-mouth recommendations and ultimately influence purchase decisions! Strategic Experiential Marketing Campaigns to Drive Word-of-Mouth
- Delivers Real-Time ROI – There are many ways to track the ROI of your experiential marketing efforts. Everything from onsite sales to coupon redemption to number of interactions. The power of experiential marketing is that you can easily correlate all of the feedback to a specific engagement. You can track your program success in real-time to allow you to make slight changes to your experiential marketing strategy to improve overall campaign success and maximize your ROI. How to Measure the ROI of Your Mobile Tours
- Integrates Across Mediums – Experiential Marketing is easily integrated into your marketing plan. An integrated program is more powerful by providing message consistency, creative consistency, multiple touch-points, increased recognition and saving time and money. 5 Reasons Integrated Marketing Just Makes Sense
- Develops Content – Experiential marketing campaigns provide the opportunity to generate content to use in other marketing mediums. For example, video testimonials could be used in online campaigns, event footage can create powerful television commercials and engaging photos captured at experiential marketing events can drive users to social media sites to share their experience with others. In addition, a great experiential marketing campaign provides a hook for PR and creates another opportunity to generate buzz and awareness about your brand.
- Provides Extended and Targeted Reach – Experiential marketing allows you to have an extended reach while still staying extremely targeted. For example, you can reach consumers in specific markets with ideal incomes at a select age all by choosing the right events and venues for your program. This means that you have less waste in reaching the wrong people and create a more efficient and targeted program by engaging only the consumers who are the best fit for your brand. You can extend the reach of any program by planning multiple events in multiple locations or by taking your experiential marketing program on the road and engaging consumers in many locations.
Experiential marketing is a powerful tool with many benefits allowing brands to get face-to-face with their consumers to drive real results and build brand vitality!