Take Your Pants Off and Dance with Experiential Marketing

Experiential marketing is NOT risky business.

There’s no Cost Per Click(CPC) or Cost Per Thoursand (CPM) metric. It doesn’t produce graphs of data points showing every move the consumer makes. Rather, experiential marketing campaigns – the good ones – affect the analytics you are already tracking. We will happily take credit for the $1 million increase in the pipeline, 300% sales lift and record viewership numbers, but effective experiential marketing campaigns do more than that.  Effective event marketing campaigns build your brand by gaining lifelong customers.

Effective experiential marketing campaigns drive traffic to your website, generate unique PR opportunities and, most importantly, begin relationships that your existing CRM process can then foster. Experiential marketing should not stand alone, and thusly should not be measured alone. But what it does well (micro-target, initiate emotional loyalty, and generate buzz) will help your metrics across the board, provided you build your campaign with those objectives in mind.

In an economy where risk-averse CMO’s play their cards conservatively out of fear of losing their jobs, I invite you to take your pants off and dance with us. (I just took a helluva risk by assuming you acknowledged the movie references throughout and that you can bring yourself to remember when Tom Cruise was, well, not running in all his movies.) I hope I don’t lose my job.