Why Experiential Marketing? Examples to Enhance Your Brand Awareness

By: Regina M.

Experiential marketing, otherwise known as live marketing, grassroots marketing, or engagement marketing, is a unique way to deliver your product to your customers. It utilizes direct engagement to incite customer participation. It enhances your brand image and memorability and customer loyalty. Successful activations generate leads, word-of-mouth marketing, user-generated content, and ultimately, drive sales and brand awareness.

Beyond this, events allow your business to experiment with new product offerings or unusual gimmicks. It allows you to get to know your customers better and gather data on what else you can do to improve your business.

Experiential marketing, however, is more than just selling your product—it is all about telling the story of your brand. To tell an effective story, you must be able to connect with your customer base. Through temporary but memorable events, installations, and other immersive tools, you can enable your customers to create meaningful memories. More specifically, it allows customers to partake in your brand’s world and vision one-on-one, ultimately enriching your consumers’ emotional connection to the brand through direct and multi-sensory engagement.

Continue reading to learn how Verafede can help you, through the different examples of experiential marketing.

Pop-up Events

A common example of experiential marketing pop-up events. There are many ways to go about this. For example, you could bring your business to different cities or communities. This method will enable you to introduce new, untapped markets to your products, and thus grow your customer base.

When you bring your business out-of-town, you might want to consider special gimmicks, contests, events, or discount schemes that will entice potential markets to attend your event.

Alternatively, having recurrent or seasonal pop-ups—whether independently or as part of a community, whether you’re hosting or not—could help you establish a routine with your customers and build loyalty. Furthermore, you can also collaborate with fellow businesses or charities in order to fulfill your respective interests.

Workshops

Another example is holding workshops. By teaching your customers a new skill or two, you can simply show them where your products slot into their daily lives—and how they can make their lives easier. As such, this kind of event can be an avenue for building customer loyalty. On the flip side, your brand will also be able to establish its authority or expertise in its niche.

Furthermore, promoting these workshops through online platforms, such as email marketing and social media advertising can also increase brand awareness, even among unexplored markets.

Networking or Community Events

Experiencing community through your brand can also make for an unforgettable customer experience. Examples of these would be book clubs, game nights, movie nights, and baking or cooking activities, among others. You can also host a workshop series or an open house. This allows people to forge connections with one another and maximize your business’ offerings, whether it be through the venue itself or through your products.

Capitalizing on shared interests, however niche or communal they may be, can foster a sense of unity among your customer base, and can attract other potential markets.

Guerilla Marketing

Guerilla marketing is also an example of experiential marketing. These advertising tactics often bank on the unexpected and unconventional, and the results are often remarkable and attention-grabbing. It depends greatly on community participation and word-of-mouth marketing. Successful tactics often result in viral moments and can inspire awe or discussion surrounding your brand and product.

Immersive Technology

Advanced technologies such as augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) can be utilized to creatively market your products through immersive and interactive means, which can make for an adventurous and exciting customer experience. By placing your customers in virtual environments, they can experience your products in a novel way, opening up new avenues for interaction and collaboration. Additionally, features such as haptic feedback, motion sensors, and interactive displays can boost the immersive factor of such installations.

Virtual Events

Your event does not need to be offline or physical for it to be experiential. It is also possible to promote experiential opportunities through online events and experiences. The pandemic certainly proved its potential for success. Hosting online events like workshops, or networking events allows you to heighten your brand’s identity. More importantly, this avenue enables you to reach customers beyond your city, region, or country.

Immersive technology can also play a big part in this endeavor, allowing your audience to enjoy your offerings even from a remote setting.

Integration with Social Media Marketing

Although experiential marketing primarily focuses on physical and offline encounters, you can also leverage it to invigorate your brand’s online presence. For example, creating beautiful, instagrammable photo opportunities can incentivize attendees to post about the experience and share it with their followers. This is especially useful now that influencer marketing is integral to brand success. If you’re lucky, these posts can garner a lot of attention, or better yet, go viral.

Conclusion

Experiential marketing is an integral component of your business’ strategy. By cultivating a personal relationship with your consumers through sensory and emotional experiences, whether

that be through pop-ups, community or networking events, or immersive, technologically-driven events, your business can stand out in a saturated and fast-paced cultural mainstream. Successful experiential marketing can drive customer loyalty, tap into unrealized markets, and can result in word-of-mouth marketing and user-generated content.

Marketing agencies or in-house marketing units will organize these kinds of events from ideation to execution and post-processing. At Verafede, we make your experiential events come to life! We offer comprehensive services from project conceptualization, logistics, talent management, activity ideation & execution, to booth design & fabrication, setup & execution, and overall event management.

Reach out to us here and let’s begin!