How to Grow Your Business with Experiential Marketing

A strategic guide to implementing experiential marketing that creates authentic customer connections through real-life brand interactions and memorable experiences.

The following is a guest post from my bloggy friend Taylor McKnight on behalf of Pro Motion. Interested in having a guest post on my website? Click here for my guest post submission form.

From Virtual to Visceral: Building Your Brand Through Live Experiences

Digital marketing is very crucial for businesses that want to grow. However, focusing all of your efforts and money on just reaching people through their smartphones won’t be a good winning strategy.

Today, consumers are looking for more than just virtual interaction. They want real engagement with their favorite brands. In short, they want live experiences. And experiential marketing comes in as the best option.

What is Experiential Marketing? 

Experiential marketing is also known as event marketing, engagement marketing, live marketing, on-the-ground marketing, XM marketing, or participation marketing.

Generally, experiential marketing refers to a marketing strategy that allows customers to interact with a brand in a real-life situation. Here, a business uses tangible, hands-on, and participatory materials to show its consumers what it offers and stands for.

It is also a mutually advantageous relationship between a business and customer in a genuinely branded engagement. In short, an experiential marketing campaign offers your customers the chance to interact with your business in a unique, informative, and entertaining way.

Now that you understand what experiential marketing is, let’s see how important it is to your brand.

How to Grow a Business with Experiential Marketing

1. Initiate Memory Creation

It is our emotions that create memories that translate into experiences. So these experiences can motivate your consumers’ buying decisions.

In experiential marketing, marketers can create scenarios to make customers feel or connect. But that’s not as easy as it sounds.

2. Build Friendship

When creating memorable experiences, innovative marketers can make use of psychology. That’s by using the Propinquity Effect, which is a notion for a simple truth. It means that an increase in interaction increases the chances of building friendships.

If you use an amazing live event, you’ll most likely attract people into a real engagement. And this builds friendship between the brand and the customers, resulting in an increased consumer base.

3. Emphasize the Benefits and Solve Problems

Understanding how your target audience thinks of your brand is the first step to building an engaging and memorable experience. To do so, you must look beyond their income and age bracket. Start by forgetting any data you may have about your audience.

Instead, be psychoanalytical. Think of a fictitious customer standing in front of you. Inquire from them to understand how your product impacts them.

Do they feel excited, satisfied, uneasy, transformed, or connected to others? Does it solve their problems? Doing so will better understand your customers and determine what to do best to fulfill their desires.

With experiential marketing, your brand will grow to success. That’s because this marketing strategy uses such information to develop a remarkable experience that emphasizes the benefits and settles doubts and problems.

4. Creating Clever and Compelling Experiences

Marketers in experiential marketing often create crafty and captivating experiences that stir people’s emotions. By doing so, they achieve your brand’s goals by focusing on the feelings their activations trigger.

You can do so without a huge marketing budget. This marketing campaign enables you to organize a live event that fully captures your brand in a vibrant, experiential way.

In other words, an experiential marketing strategy enables your customers to connect and relate with your brand in an educational, unique, and entertaining manner. It, therefore, provides value to your business and customers.

Tips on Experiential Marketing Events

1. Be Authentic
Experiential marketing enables you to showcase what your business stands for rather than just saying it. If you create a real and true experience to your business’s personality and mission, you’ll create a deeper and more authentic connection with your customers.

Such experiences are what the consumers remember. They fill their minds’ niche space with your business’s unique personality.

2. Stay in the Moment
As you figure out what will work with your audience, put yourself in that moment. You should not just give your customers what you want. Give them something reasonable and useful in today’s world.

Think about how your brand’s service or product will improve their experience. You’ll most likely create a great, memorable, and positive association for the brand when you become part of their journey.

3. Encourage Participation

Experiential marketing can be an ideal strategy for demonstrating unique features or products. It fully engages your audience and increases their time testing and trying out your products.

By involving their minds and bodies in a special event or experience, the customers will always get interested in what your business provides.

4. Make it Memorable

You should use your experiential activation to tell your audience a story that makes your brand part of their lives. It should also drive them to share your story with their colleagues, friends, and family.

An engaging event that offers such a level of sharing naturally builds an incredible number of impressions.

How to Succeed in Experiential Marketing

1. Determine your target audience

The first thing you need to do is to choose your target audience. Here, focus on specific personas you intend to attract. After that, invest your efforts and money in their interests.

2. Match your audience’s needs with your brand goals

Once you know your persona’s interests, formulate goals revolving around their interests. Address them directly, measure your engagement levels, make adjustments, test, and repeat.

3. Develop a solid community

That’s possible by engaging with your customers creatively in person at your events. This will make you a thought leader and help you leverage the community in your future events.

4. Make it shareable

Always ensure you create an event that covers the basics. Make it very memorable and entertaining to impact any network of audience. Also, your content should be easy to share and ask your audience to do so.

5. Generate amazing content from your event

Examples of Experiential Marketing

• Refinery29: 29Rooms 
• M&M: Flavor Rooms
• Lululemon: Proud & Present
• Red Bull: Stratos
• Benefit Cosmetics: A Lashtatstic Virtual-Media Campaign
• Facebook: Facebook IQ Live
• Docker: Docker Dash
• Zappos: Google Cupcake Ambush
• Coca-Cola: FIFA World Cup VR Experience
• Vans: House of Vans

Experiential marketing offers businesses a creative, engaging, and genuine way to add value to their customers and success. This strategy helps you inform and show your audience what your brand offers. Doing so increases customer engagement and generally boosts brand awareness, resulting in business growth.