You don’t have to be a flashy marketing executive to know just how important it is to engage your customers on multiple levels. Traditionally speaking, all of the legacy techniques tend to focus on verbal messages and visual cues – flashy graphics as well as catchy bylines which are designed to incite a call to action. Of course in recent times a lot of forward-thinking merchants and advertisers have taken to implementing more drastic approaches, namely, “experiential marketing”.
In short, experiential marketing is a type of promotion that seeks to inundate a certain consumer demographic in a product or service. For example, if your business specializes in something like carpet cleaning perhaps a great approach would be to simply organize a demonstration for certain homeowners in a well-to-do neighborhood. Better yet, why not arrange to display the effectiveness of your service during a gathering? In this way, you can immerse your target audience in actual results, thereby imprinting the experience on their minds.
Actually pulling off a successful experiential marketing campaign is another issue altogether though. Naturally, you will need to figure out which flavor or tactic you want to employ. Some people prefer a more lax approach, not particularly aggressive but still somewhat inclusive and showy. Others tend to take a more direct pathway to their consumers via guerilla marketing, which can be quite forceful. In either case, you must remember to respect the rights of individuals and not try to influence them negatively, the last thing you want to do is leave them shaking their heads in disapproval.
First off, you’ll need to secure your funding and gather up all of your materials. This may or may not be easily done, depending on what you’re selling. Next, it’s time to devise an actual strategy. Remember, the goal is to engage the consumer on multiple levels; in other words, the more sensory data you put forth, the better. Let’s say that you’re marketing a new energy drink, for instance. A common experiential marketing technique would be to suddenly move in on a rather busy spot, quickly set up a booth / display and then begin passing out some samples. However, this might only be partially effective. A truly wonderful EM campaign might include bringing in a well-known local music group (who could also be promoting a recent album release, for example) for a little bit of cross-promotion. In this way, people will be exposed to the product’s colors, logo, and taste as well as begin to associate it with the popular band and even one or more of their songs.
At the end of the day, the effectiveness of your experiential marketing efforts will boil down to your own creativity. In fact, there really aren’t any limitations here, and if you’re resourceful and inventive enough there is absolutely no reason why EM won’t work for you. Of course the most important variable in the equation is the viability and usefulness of your product/service, and assuming that everything’s good in that department you should be quite successful.
