Marketing strategies are about being able to construct a personality for your brand. It takes considerable time and effort to give a face to your business unless you have some bearing on the market. Experiential marketing is the most effective instrument for the newer brands to survive beside the prominent veterans. Event marketing or live marketing takes into account the less obvious emotional cues from the consumers to align their marketing efforts with their demands. That helps the brands learn about the ways they think, share, act, and purchase. Paying attention to the consumer emotions involved in the browsing and buying process enables brands to find the loyalists among them.
Experiential marketing uses top-down processing
Most of the brands engaging in mobile tours, truck tours, pop-up shops and shipping container stores leverage the top-down processing theory. It means that we always assume the characters of new experiences depending on the data we have already stored about it. The data can include our expectations, past experiences, existing knowledge, and beliefs. In fact, about 90% of the times, we do not really “see” what is around us. We form our opinion of events and the surrounding environment by our previous experiences. It helps us contextualize the new data we are receiving and understand it too.
Utilize a person’s past experiences to form opinions about your brand
A significant part of smart marketing is leveraging the existing knowledge of a potential customer to establish the presence of your new brand. Research shows that glass truck tours, mobile tours, out-of-home interactive marketing and live events are more successful than conventional billboards, TVCs, and radio spots. This is because the new-age event marketing stints utilize public environments like a shopping mall foyer or the parking lot of a public school. Setting up shop at a known location helps new companies reach their potential consumers in familiar environments, where they are already confident and comfortable. By implementing a dedicated event strategy – perhaps with the help of a brand activation agency that specializes in planning and executing immersive events to create a strong emotional connection with your audience – your marketing efforts can be more focused and impactful.
Free samples attract positive emotions and better reviews
Apart from utilizing familiar environments, marketers use the act of offering free samples to the people. The very act of providing something complementary to the people can create the urge to do something sweet in return. For example – when you give out free samples of your skincare product or a complimentary scoop of your new ice cream flavor, you are urging people to leave your company a review on Yelp or any social media site. In fact, if you ask for reviews and ratings directly, you are more likely to get positive reviews more frequently, when you offer samples to your consumers.
Why do you need experiential marketing?
Experiential marketing assures that a person is more likely to remember the event by dint of the positive emotions and good memories associated with it. Apart from leveraging unique ways to capture the target audience’s attention, setting up a knock-out event at a familiar location will etch your name and the product data permanently in an audience’s memory. According to studies over 90% global marketers are of the view that engagement via experiential marketing is compelling.