Experiential Marketing: Making Advertising Multi-Sensory
Are your prospective customers seeing your ads or are they experiencing them? It is always nice for a prospective customer to see or hear about your product at an event. It’s quite another thing entirely for them to interact with it. The key to selling is to connect an emotion to a product and service. People may not always remember what they’re told about a product. They do, however, remember how it sounds, what it tasted like, what it felt like, what it did when they pushed the buttons. It allows the brand to connect with audiences by bringing the product to life in a meaningful way. Experiential marketing makes advertising and promotion multi-sensory. Audience participation through experiential marketing events exposes your audience to your product in a memorable and highly effective way.
What are some examples?
Showcase and demo your product at events related to your product and target audience. Summer months are great for outdoor experiential promotions through booths and sponsorship’s of popular events like concerts and annual local festivals for B2C marketers. On the B2B side, trade shows, conventions, and annual meetings can be just as effective. When given the opportunity to hear directly from customer you should listen. Be sure to get their feedback and take it into consideration. Follow up with them in a timely manner. Keep them informed about future events and products they might be interested in. As media planners we tend to view campaign success through ROI, GRPs, CRMs, ratings, eyeballs, readers, viewers, clicks, impressions, etc. Experiential marketing, however, isn’t measured that way so planning and research is key to making these viable brand awareness, lead generation, and market research opportunities and not money down the tubes.
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