How to Plan Successful Experiential Marketing Campaigns

Unlike traditional, one-way advertising, successful experiential marketing campaigns enable brands to truly interact with their customers. It can turn your product or service into something tangible and better communicate your company’s personality.

A clever experiential campaign not only gains you attention on the street; it can also trigger an explosion in social media activity and earn you press coverage worth a pretty penny.

To help you get started planning an experiential event for your business, we asked some of the leading experiential agencies for their advice…

Related: 6 Small brands delivering incredible live experiences

Adam Azor, Senior Vice President, Jack Morton Worldwide

Experiential has become one of the most effective marketing disciplines. Its symbiotic relationship with content and social media has seen it become not just an alternative to traditional media but a powerful tool of modern marketing.

When planning your first experiential campaign there are two things that must be considered before everything else:

– What do I want to achieve?
– Who is my audience?

And they should be thought about in that order. Before anything is done, ensure you’re clear on what the outcome you require is, know what success looks like.

Once you’re clear on your outcome, use your strategy time to understanding the most important competent of any experiential campaign, the audience. Experiential is about involving the audience in the narrative, without that audience, it’s like presenting to an empty room. Know who your audience is, what they like, what they don’t like, know where they are going to be and how you’re best to engage with them.

While it seems obvious, it’s scary how often people get excited and jump straight into creative or try and shoehorn in the latest innovative technology, before they have spent the time to understand who their audience is.

Once you’re clear on your audience, you can then move forward and create extraordinary experiences that will deliver effectiveness, but without putting the effort into the audience planning, you will massively increase your chance of failure.

And finally, please make sure that you’re working with people who have expertise in experiential. As experiential grows, more marketers and agencies claim to be experiential, however there are so many nuances in this discipline, especially on the live delivery side that you must have trust that your team can deliver what they claim or you will fall at the final hurdle.

Joss Davidge, Director of the Unexpected, BEcause Experiential

Experiential is the perfect platform for immersive and emotive storytelling. With no other channel allowing for the same level of direct engagement or face-to-face encounters, experiential enables brands to create experiences that leave a positive, lasting impression.

But now advancements in the capability of immersive technologies such as augmented reality and virtual reality have kicked open the doors for even more emotive and engaging experiences. For brands planning their first experiential event, this technology provides an incredible opportunity for consumers to immerse themselves in products and brands in fresh, unique and engaging ways.

VR offers consumers the chance to travel to worlds never before conceivable, and the only limit is the imagination. AR can dazzle and enhance a real-life experience by blending virtual worlds with the real world. Both allow brands to tell their story in ways that have never been possible before.

The WWF-UK’s “Tiger Experience” is a great example of this. Delivered by BEcause, the campaign uses virtual reality at its heart to bring to life the challenges that tigers face in the wild in compelling fashion. Combining virtual reality with a 360° CGI film, the experience transports participants on an immersive journey, raising awareness of the reality of tiger poaching, and driving donations and pledges of support.

The more immersive and realistic you can make something, the greater emotional response you will get back in turn. And only by tapping into real emotions can brands win over audiences and make sure their message is heard loud and clear.

Sally Durcan, Managing Director, Hotcow

My advice is always to know your outcome. Experiential works on many levels but the type of idea or strategy you adopt is dependent on what you want to achieve. For example PR coverage, product trial or brand education.

When planning your campaign, work backwards based on what your most important goal is. For example if it is ‘product trial’ – ask yourself when everyone has trialled the product, what’s next? Do I need to communicate with them again, do I need to ask them their opinion or feedback on the product or do I need to find out if positive sentiment has changed since the campaign. If the answer is ‘yes’ to all of those then you need to implement this into the campaign.

If you want to communicate with people again you have to get their email addresses or get them to like you on one of your social channels – you will need to think of a competition or reason why they should be interested in doing this.

If you want to ask feedback and opinion you need to think about how you are distributing your samples. For example they only get a free sample if they answer a question.

If you want to find out about changes in opinion you need to run a survey to gauge people’s feedback before and after the sampling has taken place.

Planning and understanding what your outcomes will be are key to a successful campaign.

Jason Megson, Managing Director, Vice President, George P. Johnson

As with all marketing activity the first thing you’ll need to do before you even talk to a brand experience agency is to define the business problem you are trying to solve.

It’s as simple as always starting with the “why?” and then continuing to reference back to this overall objective throughout the planning, delivery and post-activity.

If it is your brand’s first foray into the broadly defined world of experiential, then I’d advise you do your research. Start with competitor brands’ recent and most successful work and then widen your search to include brands that may be in different sectors, but are still talking to a similar target audience with their activation. Once you’ve assessed and analysed the successes and failures from your research, the next and most important step is to write a brief. This could be as part of the external agency pitch process or for an internal brand experience delivery team.

When compiling your brief, be sure to set aside adequate time as despite the fact that this might be no more than two pages long, you’ve got to be as focussed and single minded as possible. Don’t be tempted to use meaningless and overused phrases such as “create a ‘wow’ moment” unless you can succinctly define within the brief what a “wow moment” looks like for your brand. In addition, be sure to share the learnings from your research such as the types of things you don’t want to see as they have been done before or are not on-brand.

Finally, it’s vital to outline how the experience’s success will be measured both in isolation and as part of the wider business.

Tomasz Dyl, Managing Director, GottaBe! 

First of all before conducting an experiential activity, do your research and find previous examples – whether it is related or not related to your industry or brand. There are plenty of examples online. Analyse, and find out how you would execute your campaign.

When picking an agency it is important that they are passionate and love what they do. Make sure they are enthusiastic about their clients and go that extra mile to reach success. After all you don’t want to feel like you’re just a number bringing them in some money. It’s also very important that you like the agency’s way of working. This is fundamental for a good working relationship between the client and the agency. If you can’t get along, then it’s not going to work out and can damage your credibility with the brand.

Trust is key – make sure you can feel comfortable trusting the agency with your campaign. Do a little research and find out its expertise (and hire on that basis). If you want to target a high volume of consumers then it may be wise to go for a big agency that can help you achieve that. After all, if they don’t have the resources, they surely can’t help you! Be sure to set a list of objectives from the outset and be crystal clear about expectations, whilst establishing any off limit areas. Most of all, make sure you set a budget – and stick to it.

When it comes to ROI, it might not be instant – some campaigns take months to pay off. A key thing here is patience and to carry on with the momentum – use your social media channels wisely to remind people about the activity, post pictures, videos, testimonials, etc. as part of an on-going content marketing strategy.

Conclusion

It’s easy to get excited about organising an experiential event, but before you get swept up with an idea, do your research and be clear on your goals. To carry off your campaign without a hitch and to ensure you get maximum value, consult the experts.

Read this next: How to Create a Winning Event Plan (Plus Free Template)