Campaign tips and considerations

A well planned experiential campaign will raise the profile of a Brand’s, increases product awareness, encourages consumer loyalty and effectively communicates the brand’s voice and identity.

When planning an experiential marketing campaign there are lots of factors to look at and consider

Tips For Experiential Marketing Success

1.Know Your Audience

THE most important aspect of an experiential campaign is ensuring that your target consumer has a memorable and stimulating experience that is relevant to your Brand and something that they can relate to.

This might seem obvious but often this can be overlooked in the desire to be ‘quirky’, ‘groundbreaking’ or ‘cool’.

Once you’ve identified exactly who your target market is it’s time to think about what you want to SAY.

2. Getting the messaging RIGHT

Again this sounds obvious, but all too often Brands come to us with ideas that are just too complicated. The most successful campaigns have simplicity at the heart of them.

Keep your messaging clear, direct and in line with all of your other marketing messaging, to ensure that your Brand Messages are consistent and ‘on Brand’.

What do you want consumers to take away from their experience? Use this to inform the messaging.

Now is not the time to come up with a cryptic message or to be too ‘clever’ – using jargon or complicated ‘in jokes’ will only alienate people.

If there is a disparity between the ‘feel’ of the campaign and your brand’s desired image, then the experiential campaign may not be as effective as it could. Note that we said your brands ‘desired‘ image… As well as promoting products and brand image, an experiential marketing campaign can be used as a way to alter the public’s opinion of your brand, to be closer aligned to your ideal brand image.

3.Choose The Right Location

In a similar way to defining the audience, selecting the right venue is very important. Once your audience is defined, selecting a venue will be much easier.

• Where do the audience spend their time?
• Out of those locations, at which ones are they likely to be willing to stop and watch, or get involved in the campaign?
• Will the campaign be run from one location, or be taken ‘on the road’?

If you choose the wrong venue, you reduce the opportunity to engage with the right consumer and ultimately will waste your budget.

Alternatively, if your location is already defined (ie. a Store Opening) then find out what can be achieved in the available space and ALWAYS check if you need permissions or licenses.

4.Define Your KPIs & Methods of Measurement & reporting

There’s no denying it, planning and running an effective experiential campaign takes a considerable amount of time, expertise and creative flair. Having a clear set of goals and defined methods of measuring results is therefore a must! Data-led sales is inherent in our business and we have a multitude of ways we can measure and report on the impact of our experiential campaigns, however these vary depending on the goals of each specific campaign.

As a basic example, for a company that wants to grow their customer base, an experiential campaign that includes product demonstration or sampling would be an appropriate solution. In cases like these, consumers can be asked questions about their opinion of the brand before and after the campaign, and the shift in their perception used as one of the key performance indicators and propensity to purchase.

For retail based campaigns, where you have less dwell time to engage with consumers, the best way to measure success is through EPOS data, highlighting your brands sales uplift. It’s important to measure not just uplift on the day of experiential activity but have in place a measurement system to capture the ‘halo’ affect in the coming weeks and sometimes months. You can also identify the impact the campaign has had on influencing consumers to switch from competitor brands.

Online metrics can also be used, such as mentions of a brand or product across a plethora of social media networks.

The right metrics vary considerably depending on the campaign and its goals. Just be sure to define them before you launch your campaign!

5.Expand The Reach – Taking The Offline, Online!

By their very nature, experiential marketing campaigns lend themselves extremely well to online promotion. People love telling others about their experiences, and if your campaign makes a good impression, those witnessing the event can spread the news of your campaign to a much wider audience than actually take part in the real world.

There’s no need to leave this to chance either. Make it easy for your audience. Although, as with measuring success, the tactics for each campaign will vary somewhat, here are a few ideas to get you started:

• Identify and connect with key influencers (on social networks and blogs) before the event and get them involved (tweets and blog posts).
• Create a video of the day, and upload it to YouTube as early as possible.
• Create a Twitter hashtag for the event, and make it known to your audience (use on promotional material, like signs, leaflets and t-shirts).
• Offering a prize to those using the hashtag can increase uptake in its use.
• Use social PPC as a form of content discovery – YouTube promoted videos (TrueView) offer an ideal way to promote the video of your event
• Set-up social monitoring of not only your hashtag, but also product and brand keywords, and venue specific keywords, and have staff primed and ready to respond to any comments.

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