4 Ways Experiential Marketing Beats Traditional Marketing
While Super Bowl commercials still command six figures for thirty seconds, brands of all sizes are focusing more heavily on experiential marketing than ever before. Creating an emotional connection with consumers is not only more affordable than marquee traditional advertisements, the results are priceless.
Experiential marketing has numerous advantages over traditional marketing, and here are four ways that it’s better than ever.
1. CREATING MOMENTS THAT LAST
Advertising isn’t worth much if it doesn’t have a lasting impact on your target audience. Memorable moments create lasting brand relationships and evangelists and generate organic social shares, which live in people’s feeds differently than advertorial content. Experiential marketing gets to the root of the audience’s psyche through immersion and action. Consider these stats from OnSpot Social:
People generally remember…
2. POSITIVE BRAND ASSOCIATIONS
A brand association is what consumers think of or remember when they hear your brand’s name. Experiential marketing works because it invites your audience to do something memorable and create a positive brand association. An emotional connection to your brand may not be on the list of traditional ROI measurables, but it should be. Brand sentiment is rapidly becoming one of the leading ways to measure the success of a campaign.
3. DEVELOPING AND REPURPOSING CONTENT
The buzz generated by an experiential activation creates an amazing opportunity to reach an even larger audience beyond the attendees. Not only can content be shared on social by your brand and attendees, it can also be repurposed and distributed through different media channels after the experiential activation has taken place. Budweiser held a tongue-in-cheek funeral for 3.2% beer in Utah after the Prohibition-era law was repealed, which led to a fun night in downtown Salt Lake City and content creation opportunities for an ongoing campaign marking the arrival of true “Bud Heavy” in Utah. Instead of a commercial shot in a studio setting, the campaign relied on imagery and footage captured during the experiential 3.2 funeral. Talk about getting more for your ad dollar!
4. REAL TIME INSIGHTS
There is a critical distinction in the age of social media–does your ad have engagement, or just reach? You can buy space in all the Newsfeeds in the world, but if you don’t engage your audience, it’s simply not an effective marketing strategy. Experiential marketing engages consumers in ways that go beyond the endless scroll of content and gives brands real-time insights into how consumers respond to your brand and content.
IKEA recently threw a series of in-store sleepovers and “after hours” sleep festivals that not only turned many shoppers’ dreams into reality (sleep in one of those comfy IKEA beds!? Yes, please), it gave the brand valuable insight into what products resonate most with consumers. What better way to know which beds are most in-demand than celebrating all things sleep at IKEA stores in memorable fashion?
Experience Matters
When it comes to marketing, delivering experiences matters. Brands that can engage and delight consumers are more likely to be top of mind, create positive brand associations, and even gain priceless consumer insights that cannot be replicated by even the most detailed analytics tools on traditional interrupt ads. And if you want to throw a memorable activation, experience matters, too.
