What is Experiential Marketing (7 Benefits and Examples)

Customer involvement is critical for every company that wants to establish a great reputation in the marketplace. A brand generally engages its clients in a sequence of actions that are enjoyable, unique, and difficult to forget.

Experiencing campaigns helps you convey your ideas without interruptions by being engaging and real. That’s why Experiential Marketing comes into action to take your marketing game to another level.

What is experiential marketing?

Experiential marketing, beyond traditional or digital marketing, is a uniquely rapid and successful technique to increase brand recognition via face-to-face interactions with customers. It appeals to all five senses, evoking emotions that result in long-term memories that have been found to increase brand loyalty. Experiential marketing allows you to create brand recognition and loyalty while connecting with your customers in a genuine and real way. You'll be compensated with in-depth consumer knowledge that might be priceless.

Consumers can connect and experience your brand in ways they couldn't with other marketing methods, and you can generate incredible moments that establish confidence and commitment with existing customers and lure new customers to discover more about your business. Experiential marketing is all about integrating customers into real-life situations. It's possible that you have already adopted a common technique while planning your event.

What do experts say about Experiential Marketing?

• “Experiential marketing, also called “engagement marketing,” is a marketing strategy that invites an audience to interact with a business in a real-world situation. Using participatory, hands-on, and tangible branding material, the business can show its customers not just what the company offers, but what it stands for.” — Braden Becker, HubSpot
• “The premise of experiential marketing is to create a closer bond between the consumer and the brand by immersing them in a fun and memorable experience.” — David Moth, Barclaycard
• “Experiential marketing — loosely defined as messaging you can touch, feel or view in a physical space.” — Shareen Pathak, Adage.com
• “Experiential marketing is a type of marketing that directly engages or immerses a target audience in a live event. Also referred to as “live marketing,” “participation marketing” or sometimes “brand activation,” experiential marketing gets your customers involved in your brand or products and lets them experience it in real-time.” — Tara Johnson, Tinuiti.
• “Experiential marketing, also called engagement marketing, is a marketing strategy that directly engages consumers and encourages them to participate in a brand experience.” — Kiely Kuligowski, Business News Daily
• “Experiential marketing is a modern marketing strategy that engages potential customers through innovative, immersive experiences. These experiences don’t just sell products—they facilitate a customer’s identification with a brand as a whole.” — Caroline Goldstein, Fundera
• “The premise of experiential marketing is to create a closer bond between the consumer and the brand by immersing them in a fun and memorable experience.” — David Moth, Barclaycard

7 Benefits of Experiential Marketing

Experiential Marketing can play a crucial role in spreading the word about your brand. Customer associations may be made by enabling customers to engage themselves in a subjective experience of your brand as part of a well scheduled and targeted marketing activation.

According to a 2016 report, 74% of customers agreed that participating in branded event marketing events increases their likelihood of purchasing the items being sold. Furthermore, 73% of the participants share photos from the events on social media, generating interest in the company and products.

Here are some of the aspects discussing the benefits of selecting experiential marketing to promote your brand and business:-

• Allows customers to use their senses

One of the conventional motivations for holding an experiential marketing session is to provide customers the opportunity to "experience, touch, taste, hear, and smell" a product. This way customers are more inclined to consume food and beverages if they can taste them. Customers who are able to smell candles and air purifiers may determine which items they like before purchasing.

It's worth noting that organizations that provide services (rather than just selling things) might provide customers the chance to try out goods with their senses.

Music can be played to demonstrate the equipment's quality. Eco-friendly cleaning product manufacturers can allow customers to smell their goods to prove that they don't include substances that cause irritation.

• Generates Leads and Sales

Experiential marketing may also contribute to revenue and sales. Several surveys show that after attending an experiential marketing event, the majority of the consumers stated that they are more interested in buying a product or service.

Experiential marketing events are also effective in generating leads. 50% of businesses "indicated their purpose for experiential marketing events was to generate leads, while 41% said they utilized them to expand their prospect databases.

• Grows Consumer Relationships

Despite social and digital marketing, brands employ experiential to build connections with consumers. Firms in industries such as automobile, financing, and consumer packaged goods may design one-of-a-kind, engaging, comprehensive experiences to help prospects progress through their marketing pipelines.

Email, direct mail, sponsored advertisements, and other traditional marketing channels just don't provide the same quality, especially for younger populations. Whereas experiential events can do that.

• Aids in the communicating company's Beliefs and Values

Consumers are more willing to feel devoted to a company if they share similar values, according to research. Traditional advertising approaches, on the other hand, make it difficult to communicate mission statements, values, goals, and other comparable themes. While social media posts and videos, and other forms of digital media make it simpler to share your model's narrative, catching and retaining customer's attention long enough to digest such information can be difficult.

You have a captive audience eager to receive your brand's message through a series of strategic experiences when you use experiential marketing. It's easier to remember your values and other core convictions if you express them via words and events. Having others share your messaging with customers adds an element of legitimacy that is difficult to achieve through any other means.

• Creates Direct Connection with the customers

Consumers nowadays frequently communicate with companies via email, a website, or social media. When customers call a company, they are usually chatting with someone who is miles and miles away (sometimes in another country). These encounters may be cold and aggravating.

Consumers may connect directly with individuals from their favorite businesses through experiential marketing (either employees or, more likely, well-trained brand ambassadors). Consumers may look sellers in the eyes, shake hands, and do everything they used to do while making sales and building connections at events. A pleasant one-on-one connection is much more likely to linger in the thoughts of customers and keep them coming back to the organization.

• Gives you useful statistics

Because experiential marketing enables you to connect with customers in real-time during a live event, it's quite simple to measure a number of crucial metrics. You may get accurate statistics on overall participation, Instagram and Facebook likes or other social media engagements, and product sales lead from an engagement. Other frequent quantitative measurements include the number of samples distributed, e-newsletter signups, visits to a website dedicated to the event, and the number of lead generation.

The management is pleased with the data. It also gives you the raw materials you require to improve future engagements and marketing initiatives. Experiential marketing installations may provide you with critical data without causing you too much difficulty.

• It is a lot of fun

People enjoy attending gatherings, specifically those where they can participate in significant activities or obtain considerable trials of items or services.

Experiential marketing initiatives are enjoyable for both the company hosting them and the customers participating in them. It's difficult to see how anyone can lose when the fun component is combined with the high return on investment of experiential marketing efforts.

7 Examples of experiential marketing

According to Forbes, experiential marketing may help a company build a long-term relationship with its customers. It also permits you to get important information on contributing customers, which can be used to better your approach. These efforts might employ a multi-pronged strategy. The main goal is to have a physical, offline encounter with a business, but you'll also want to have an online conversation about it.

Have a look at the following examples of Experiential Marketing to have a better understanding of this marketing strategy:

• Red Bull: World Record for highest Skydive

For virtually as long as Red Bull has been, it has been at the vanguard of extraordinary sports coverage. However, in 2012, the corporation took its content marketing to greater levels, setting a new global record. Red Bull's superterrestrial marketing strategy, dubbed Stratos, included Felix Baumgartner, an Austrian skydiver who cooperated with Red Bull to establish the world record for highest skydive.

“The height was 128,000 feet or roughly 24 miles above the surface of the Earth”.

Felix was sent to the stratosphere by Red Bull in a tiny communication capsule with a big helium-filled balloon. What's even more astounding is that his solo climb and planning for the leap enabled him to set yet another world record before safely landing back on Earth. The entire event was aired live on Red Bull's website, which had the most watching traffic of any live stream ever broadcast on YouTube, with slightly over 8 million people.

• Flavor Rooms by M&M

If you've ever had a conversation about whether peanut M&Ms or normal M&Ms are better, you know how enthusiastic people can be about sweets. As a result, when M&M wanted to pick its next taste, the business opted to do so in New York City with an interactive pop-up. The event comprised "flavor chambers," which were each outfitted with decorations and scents specific to a certain taste. The pop-up also had food and drink bars with M&M-themed beverages, which I'm sure provided plenty of opportunities for M&M to feature on various participants' social media sites.

• Lego: House of Dots (2020)

Lego collaborated with renowned color enthusiast Camille Walala to develop the “House of Dots" to promote their new tile product. This happened in London's Kings Cross, in Coal Drops Yard. A five-room interactive space was used for this purpose.

Being on-site and able to touch the goods gives a much-anticipated opportunity to try out the device. The total impression was really striking because of the collaboration with a well-known color designer. The geometric and color-blocked interiors were a photographer's dream.

• Facebook IQ Live (Facebook IQ) (2016)

Facebook, which also runs Instagram, has long recognized the value of the information it holds on how customers use both platforms. As a result, the Facebook IQ Live experience was established. That data was utilized to create live scenes that displayed the data for this experience.

The IQ Mart was one of them: a "retail" scenario that depicted an online shopper's transition process while making purchasing decisions utilizing social media. There was also a classic Instagram cafe, complete with latte art and a plethora of millennial-style picture chances with people capturing them. Not only was the marketing memorable, but it was also effective. It was also quite beneficial: 93 percent of registrants (out of approximately 1500) indicated that the event gave them useful insights on how to use Facebook for business.

• Google Cupcake Truck

Google traveled to the roads of Austin, Texas, with a cupcake truck to advertise its new picture app. People did not have to pay for the cupcakes with cash; rather, a photo shot using the app was the sole acceptable form of payment. What could be sweeter than a free-ish cupcake? This case impresses us with how well it demonstrates the advantages of experiential co-branding.

• House of Vans

Vans recently held House of Vans pop-up shops in skating parks around the country, including New York City and Chicago. This provided a venue for skateboarders to congregate, network, enjoy live music and skate. Vans also used similar skatepark popups to advertise the release of their new David Bowie-inspired shoe range. Pop-ups in and around skateparks sound like a pretty perfect fit for an experiential marketing campaign, especially because Vans is a popular shoe brand among skateboarders.

• HULUWEEN DRIVE THROUGH (2020)

Drive-throughs have gained popularity as they are safe activities that can be held in a variety of weather situations and may create an interactive environment owing to their large scale.

Through experiential activation, Hulu made their annual Huluween celebration into a four-day journey. The event was held at the LA Equestrian Center. It had a drive-through forest with stunning lights and terrifying content. Guests were given tasty goodies and, our personal favorite, the opportunity to pose in their car for the use of green screen technology in an immersive marketing photo booth.

Undoubtedly, taking some measured risks paid off well for the above businesses. So, when it comes to developing a brand experience, don't be scared to go outside the box — and don't be hesitant to collaborate with others. Spend some time considering how others could react with you, even if it sounds a little crazy. The audience will talk about it in the greatest possible way if it's in line with what you do and performed intelligently.

Experiential marketing is a fantastic approach to intuitively connect with existing and future clients. Utilize digital sites to boost real-world encounters in addition to your experiential marketing events, and constantly strive to offer excellent experiences across numerous touchpoints. Make sure your goals are clear, that you're always trying to learn more about your customers, and that you track your progress.