One of the latest marketing methods to dominate global brands, experiential marketing helps a company engage with its audience through interactive, live events the consumer can participate or experience in. It allows the brand to engage with the customers and build relationships in ways traditional marketing could not. Earlier, it was limited only to the big brands.
Any brand, big or small, can take advantage of experiential marketing thanks to social media. Earlier, the big brands did this kind of marketing through field studies, live events, in-store promotions and PR activities. Today, social media has helped smaller brands avail them. Social media adds fluidity to your experiential marketing, extending and amplifying the customer experience. This experience lasts longer than a single day and increases the chances of brand recall. Here are the top four crucial steps to setting up the best experiential marketing campaign:
Help your audience find you When strategizing for campaigns, use those social media platforms where consumers can be reached out to in a live setting like Facebook, Periscope or Twitter. Build the right hashtags and create campaign with hashtags to promote fast sharing. For a campaign that has a high visual appeal, try out Instagram or Pinterest. Find out those social media platforms where the big players in your industry hang out and ensure that your experiential campaigns are targeted there to increase the chances of landing up in your customer’s search list. Do ensure it doesn’t already have a popular, alternate use, and no ‘oops’ moments. Try to follow your influencer’s lead.
Target the right audience
Use social media demographics for precise targeting of your customers. Facebook and Twitter also has a wealth of social media analytics besides third party tools like Fan Page Karma that help you to ‘spy’ on competitor’s social media accounts and get demographic data. Good targeting increases the chances of customers picking up your campaign, running with it and making it viral.
Co-brand to up-weight your message
Co-brand—it pays! Who else in your space has a similar objective as yours, an audience that you could benefit from and who you could bring some real value to? Another way is to tap into the fan base of influencers. Use one channel to link it to another and widen reach. Correct demographic targeting through social media ads eliminates unnecessary spends.
Analyze, Report and Improvise
It’s highly important that you measure your entire exercise. Use social media analytics to understand how effective your experiential marketing campaign was, be it through content and brand impressions, content engagements, likes etc. We recommend to do this periodically throughout the activation period, especially with multi-day campaigns.
Social media acts as a catalyst in experiential marketing by toning down the financial hurdle for smaller brands. With a slew of smaller brands as well as a growing bunch of Millennials and Gen X who are complete social butterflies, this combination is here to stay and reap actual benefits.