5 Pillars of Experiential Marketing

Experiential marketing is the most effective way for a brand to increase its reach whilst creating a connection between a brand and its customers that is hard to forget. A great experiential marketing campaign must follow five simple rules.

1) Understand Your Audience

A lot of potential experiential marketing campaigns have been unsuccessful due to their motivating of trying to be ‘cool’ above being suitable and relevant to your target audience. It is hugely important to determine just what experience you want your customers to have. Who is your target audience? What do they expect? What will they like? For an experiential marketing campaign to be effective, it must know exactly who it is targeting and what it can offer them.

2) Choosing the Right Venue

Selecting a venue will become much easier once you have defined who your target audience is. Choosing the perfect location for your campaign is as important as identifying the audience itself. Try and get inside the mind of your client: where does your target audience spend the majority of their time? Out of those locations, which are likely to want to get involved with the campaign? Will your campaign be run from one location exclusively, or from a number of venues?

3) A Clear, Definitive Brand Identity

When determining your target audience, and selecting the perfect venue it can be easy to lose sight of just what the message of your brand is. You’ve worked so hard to create a strong brand identity, don’t let it get lost or diluted through an unfocused marketing campaign. Manufacture an experience that matches both the needs of the customer and the core values of the brand in order to create a lasting experience for the customer, along with an ongoing brand strength and customer loyalty for the business. Reinforcing this message through strategic exhibition design, or help from an exhibition company can help deliver a professional and powerful experiential marketing campaign.

4) Define Your Methods of Measurement Beforehand

Creating an ambitious and effective experiential marketing campaign involves a huge amount of hard work, time, expertise and creativity, even more so to implement it. Having a clear vision, a well-defined set of goals and targets for the campaign will ensure all of this hard work does not simply go to waste. Data-led sales are a massive part of any business, and the results of your marketing campaign should be no different. The method of data measurement and recording will differ from each brand identity, but a pre-determined set of achievable goals will help ensure you achieve the most from your experiential marketing campaign.

5) Expand Your Reach

People love to tell others about their experiences, both good and bad, as often and as loud as they can. The very nature of experiential marketing lends itself perfectly to a large online presence to facilitate this. Online promotion will form the backbone for any successful marketing campaign, and will provide a limitless avenue of interaction with your target audience. Using the variety of available social networking sites to identify and connect with influential people in your industry before any events is a potential way to help raise awareness. Their involvement, either through a Tweet or a Facebook post, costs them nothing, but can make a monumental difference to you campaign. Creating a unique hashtag, promoting your own videos through YouTube and setting up the monitoring of social networking sites are all ways to not only create and implement a great marketing campaign, but accurately and easily monitor its success.

Image via Walter Lim

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Reno Macri works as Managing Director at the London based Exhibition Design Company, specialising in corporate branding services like logo design, signage system, exhibition graphics, new product launches and designing exhibition stands. He loves to share his creative ideas on upcoming marketing tactics and the latest design trends. Follow me on Google +