Experiential marketing is about real engagement with your audience. Conversations that are meaningful and effective, providing you with a more realistic and accurate idea of direct interaction. It’s all about allowing and encouraging the consumer to completely immerse themselves in a product or brand, and digital is the perfect channel to do this effectively. With social media audiences constantly evolving, there has never been a better moment to ensure that digital and experiential marketing go hand in hand.
Here is our five-point checklist to ensure you maximise the effect of an experiential campaign by enhancing it with digital marketing:
Define clear campaign objectives
Like with any traditional campaign, define clear campaign objectives and KPIs to ensure that your digital experiential activity is fulfilling its purpose. And think beyond sampling figures.
What results are you looking for? What legacy do you want left behind? What do you want your audience to remember about this campaign? Where is this conversation going to go next?
Be clear on where digital fits within your campaign and what extra depth it can add. Remember, you don’t want to just be invited to the party, you should be the one organising the party, so be clear on the purpose otherwise no one is going to turn up.
Use digital to extend your campaign
Brands are always looking for new ways to extend and enrich campaigns – be it before, during or after the event. Digital provides you with the perfect platform to add to the overall engagement, providing consumers with an instant means of continuing their relationship with you.
An example of this is Genius' summer sampling tour. After tasting Genius toasted bread at festivals and events around the UK, users were encouraged to continue interaction via digital channels. The 'My Perfect Toast' campaign let users make their own virtual 'perfect toast'. The toast could then be shared on Facebook and users were rewarded with a money-off coupon for their next Genius loaf. Genius saw a voucher redemption rate of 25%, compared to an average voucher redemption rate of 2.7% (according to Valassis), and a sales increase of 18%.
Not only was this a great way to communicate with the brand’s target demographic, it established an emotional connection too. When attendees come into contact with the brand, they may associate it with their positive experiences of their summer or festival memories, which contributes to strengthening the brand’s visibility.
Be clear on what you are asking your consumers to do digitally
Whatever it is you are asking of your consumers, make sure it ties back to your original objectives and make it easily accessible.
Appeal to your consumers’ interests and activities and remember that emotional marketing messages are twice as effective as promotional ones. To make effective use of social media platforms, you should actively engage in conversation with your followers. Overly promotional tweets that offer little user interaction are more likely to be ignored by Twitter users. Instead, ask questions and utilise the ever popular hashtag function to generate a buzz around the brand. Social media users love to contribute, share and discuss content so UGC could be the perfect engagement tool for your brand – consider the legacy it will leave, long after the event or product launch.
No one likes to spend precious time figuring out what a brand is asking of them. Make it easily understandable and simple to engage with. Social media users, on average, have an attention span of eight seconds – one second less than a goldfish. Worth remembering!
Plan which channels you should utilise
Design the campaign around your target audience; where they are and what they enjoy doing. Teenagers and young adults engage on different social media platforms to the mums, so if your platform is wrong, you’ve fallen at the first hurdle. Do your research in order to ensure the message gets through to your consumers.
Leverage the power of data that digital provides in order to leave a legacy
Using data capture at the point of experiential launch, Genius recorded people’s reactions to the bread they were sampling before using location specific triggers to direct them to their nearest stockist with digital money-off coupons. This allowed Genius to stay in contact with consumers and provided opportunities for future interactions.
When devising your experiential campaign, ensure that you are utilising the best possible methods to leave a legacy long after the campaign. Digital engagement is the perfect way to maintain the relationship. Listen to your consumers and provide them with the platform and content they want from you.
Take Tate & Lyle for example. The brand extended its relationship with foodies by creating the We Love Baking Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and blog communities by sharing recipes, tips and advice and encouraging followers to post their own recipes and questions – all of which exist long after launches of Tate & Lyle products, making their target audience feel connected to the brand.
Experiential activity must have a clear link to the brand and following the steps above should ensure that digital effectively supports your experiential activity and in turn enhances your engagement with your audience. Have you enriched your experiential activity using digital? If not, why not?
By Ameet Chandarana, MD of Maynard Malone.
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