How do you attract the attention of your customers in a world with so many distractions, ads, texts, sounds, shapes, tweets, and pings? One way to do this is through experiential marketing.

Experiential marketing allows for a live, immersive, and memorable delivering of your messages with little to no distractions.

What's experiential marketing?

Experiential marketing is a method that increases a brand's experiences to engage consumers. Also known as 'live marketing' or even 'event experience marketing,' the whole idea with this type of marketing is to create a quick, fast, yet memorable impact on your targeted customers. In other ways, you want them to go from Meh to WOW in a matter of a few seconds after experiencing your product or service.

Experiential marketing, especially in the social media age, would immediately prompt people to take out their mobile phones, take pictures, boomerangs, or videos just so they can share this experience with their network, both online and offline. Coupled with the right hashtag, your experiential marketing strategy will go viral. Experiential marketing experiences take place at events, as part of an event, showcase, roadshow, or even at a pop-up activation that isn't related to any event. It's all about giving customers an immersive and live experience, so they have a closer connection to your product or service.

During events, experiential marketing campaigns usually overlap in two ways:

• Larger experiential campaign- This is where events such as a grand opening of a shop include experiential strategies to enable customers to interact with a product or service by way of touch, sound, smell.

• Smaller brand experiences- These exist within an individual experiential activation such as on-site art installations.

Whether you go large-scale or small-scale, the vital aspect of your marketing strategy begins with a simple and clear goal. There are numerous ways in which you can track the impact of your experiential campaigns.

These ways are:

• Website visits

• Interactions on your social media accounts

• Clicks to a website via your app

• App downloads

• Number of hashtagged content on social media

• Number of attendees

Depending on what your goal is, you should be able to track these conversions during and after the experiential marketing experience.

Is my business suitable for experiential marketing?

The decision to include experiential marketing as part of your business and branding strategy heavily depends on your timeline, your corporate goals, as well as the resources you have, i.e., the budget.

Because experiential marketing provides such an immersive experience, it takes a professional team with the right expertise to create the experience you've envisioned. Through this type of marketing, you can humanize your brand and provide people with lasting and positive brand impressions. Usually, the team of professionals would be able to give you ideas on how to create real-life experiences and connect them with your social and content needs to amplify your brand's reach across a variety of channels.

What are the different types of experiential marketing?

• Event marketing

Event marketing and experiential marketing are some of the most excellent and commonly used combos. Events alone are sometimes considered as a form of experiential marketing, but not all experiential marketing is considered an event. An event, at its very core, provides customers with an experience - an actual face-to-face or personal interaction is happening.

• Brand activations

Brand activations usually take place when there's a new product, service, or line that the company wants to promote. It's an excellent opportunity for experiential marketing because it provides an avenue for the company to get more media coverage, increase brand interaction with their targeted audiences, and it's a powerful way to let customers know that there's a new in-store product. A surefire way to create a fantastic experiential experience for a brand is by product sampling. Companies often use experiential marketing trailer vehicles to attract a crowd, and invite them to the vehicle to experience the brand. Because the vehicle is big, loud, and attention-grabbing such as this one: https://www.craftsmenind.com/event-promotional-vehicles-trailers, it's easy to gather a crowd, and let them immerse themselves in whatever you're launching.

• Guerrilla marketing

Guerrilla marketing is an ideal strategy to create engagement as it involves an element of surprise that's unexpected. The surprise element here is to spark conversation around the campaign, and this usually requires brainstorming and creativity - what are the goals, what are you trying to achieve, what can be done, etc. Guerrilla marketing isn't a traditional form of marketing, and it usually doesn't involve paid media. Guerilla marketing is sometimes called 'ambush' marketing, as it doesn't usually involve asking permission and could result in legal issues.

• Retail installations

A lot of people enjoy shopping and browsing through stores, which is why another method of experiential marketing is to create retail installations to attract customers into a store and increase the time they spend there. This method attracts customers and non-customers alike, and it also increases the chances of purchasing a product or signing up for a service. You can get uninterested customers intrigued. You can also increase the probability of purchase for customers who never intended to buy anything.

• Stunts

Stunt marketing is another way to pique interest, especially when there's a large audience. Content used in this type of experiential marketing needs to be relatable and easily shareable. It also has multiple layers, so that people will want to dig deeper and be curious enough to find out more.

Final Thoughts

Your brand is a winner if you can create an experiential marketing campaign that solves your customer's problems and increases your reach to a newer customer base. Keep in mind that this type of marketing isn't a quick fix to a marketing campaign, but it does help increase sales and increase brand awareness and engagement for a larger group of audience. Experiential marketing helps build your brand's presence, especially among non-customers in a more relaxed, fun, and immersive way.