Can experiential marketing help give your brand an extra edge?
In an era of excessive choice and information overload, customer expectations have risen considerably. Marketers can no longer deliver a one-way dialogue, customers are demanding meaningful conversations and opportunities to engage and connect with brands of their choice. The focus is now on customer experiences and facilitating a sincere relationship between customer and brand across many interactions.
Enter: Experiential marketing
That’s where experiential marketing comes in. According to AdAge, experiential marketing tactics can be “loosely defined as messaging you can touch, feel or view in a physical space”. It’s about real-time experiences, enabling your customers to fully engage and participate in your brand in the moment.
Today’s experiential marketing boils down to actions that get people involved. In an interview with AdAge, chief creative officer at J. Walter Thompson Worldwide, Jeff Benjamin, compared modern experiential marketing to the interactive advertising that was so popular only a few years ago. These tactics are about pulling people into a brand physically with stellar real-time experiences.
It’s garnered a lot of traction over the past few years – and for good reason. Experiential marketing encourages people to recommend brands, talk about them on social media and even purchase these brands after attending a branded event.
The growth of experiential marketing
A study by the Event Marketing Institute found that spending on event and experiential marketing increased by 4.7 per cent in a single year. American marketing agency, Moderne Communications, surveyed over 1,600 major companies and found that 84 per cent of all respondents consider experiential marketing either important, very important or critical to their company.
Modern customers crave brand experiences like live events.
This increased investment in experiential marketing can be credited to the impressive results companies using these tactics experience. One study, which surveyed over 6,500 people across a variety of markets set out to compare the effect of 23 different types of brand experiences. Experiential marketing, namely live brand events, had an impressive track record:
- 65 per cent of respondents claimed that live events were the brand experience that would most likely prompt them to recommend a brand
- 59 per cent of people felt compelled to purchase a product from a business after they had attended a live event
- 68 per cent of people further researched a brand after attending their live event, 63 per cent interacted with the brand on Facebook
- 93 per cent of people talk to others about their brand experience after attending a live function with 63 per cent of those people talking to more than five people
So, back to our original question: Can experiential marketing help give your brand an extra edge? The answer is a big, bold YES. Tapping into the powers of experiential marketing helps you focus on what makes your business successful: Your customers. It gets people talking, creating an organic reach for your brand – a presence that continues to exist long after the event has ended and everyone has gone home.
When you combine these kinds of live experiences with other strong marketing strategies (social media presence, digital ads, content marketing etc.) you are creating a brand that will not only succeed but thrive – giving your business a competitive edge.
Interested in hosting a brand event for your next product launch or campaign? We’re here to help. Our team at Orange Productions is committed to helping you deliver innovative and cutting edge events for all of your customers. Reach out to one of our representatives today to learn more about how you can get started!