Nearly 70% of marketing leaders point to customer experience as to why their companies are besting the completion.
And many of these same executives are courting an approach dubbed “experiential marketing.” Or how to merge the digital experience with real-world environs.
Experiential marketing is also called engagement marketing. This approach puts customers deep inside the realm of the product’s sphere of influence. It emphasizes a tactile experience. Or an experience where the audience walks away with a lasting emotional connection.
These experiences are unique to the product and generate a larger community around the experience and the product. Ultimately, this brings in new customers and users and builds lasting loyalty.
In the following article, we’ll discuss the basics of experiential marketing and how it can benefit your business.
4 Tenents of Experiential Marketing
A successful experiential marketing agency works on four key touchpoints:
- Personal engagement
- The synergy of product and emotion
- Positivity
- Social sharing
These four key points help build companies go beyond marketing stunts and clickbait swipe throughs. Your ideal campaign doesn’t promote quick hit admiration. It looks to promote long-lasting satisfaction and brand loyalty.
Engagement on a Personal Level
One of the biggest complaints that customers talk about is that once they’ve started their interaction, the experience falls off. The experience drops from one of engagement to one of mindless box clicking. The audience feels like a number, not an engaged participant.
Experiential marketing fosters the “human experience” and explores how the companies brand helps and stimulates them.
Merge Product and Emotion
Positive feelings merge people with their favorite brands. This synergy makes for a long-lasting connection that goes well-beyond the flavor of the month and brings customers back for years to come. Experiential marketing needs to identify and enhance the product’s potential for positivity. The customer then internalizes this positive feeling and returns to the brand repeatedly to duplicate the experience.
Positive Points of Contact
You may find this the most challenging part of your experiential marketing campaign. It is one thing to come up with a campaign that gets the customer in the funnel. It is entirely a different matter to come up with a trail of engagement that keeps them plugged-in for a long and valued period of time.
It is the difference between a click-through and an immersive experience.
One of the keys to guaranteeing multiple touchpoints is to not settle for just OK. Keep working on the concept until it rounds out to the experience you want it to be.
The Art of the Share
Lastly, the project must have an element of sharability that is par excellence!
One of the best ways to do this is to focus on video. Once upon a time, digital video was much-ballyhooed, but its returns were limited and disappointing to marketers and brand managers. Now, shared video is ubiquitous and one of the most popular forms of content on the internet.
Look for ways to exploit and include video, add your brand’s campaign to multiple streams, and make the content as popular and “sticky” as possible.
It Can Be Done!
As you have probably concluded, experiential marketing comes with unique challenges. It’s not as simple as a one-off event or digital stunt. But with attention to the four tenets of engagement marketing and the will to not settle for simplistic solutions, you can elevate your strategy.
This will ultimately lead to fostering an emotional connection and loyalty with your customers.
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