Your First Six Steps In Experiential Marketing

Marketing communications professionals know about communications but may be puzzled when tasked with creating experiences. How do you go beyond words and where do you start?

Experience-based marketing is a powerful tool for marketers, enabling you to go beyond words and bring your brands to life in an active and engaging way.

It’s an approach that creates deeper connections with customers, and it’s a significant step on from just telling someone your brand values to actually letting them live them, even if only for a few minutes.

You may very likely have heard these statements about experiential marketing before, and you may agree in essence but wonder how to actually get started. After all, most people in marketing communications are trained in communications, not in creating experiences.

To get communicators started, here are six introductory principles to help bridge the gap between marketing communications and experiential marketing. Let me apologise upfront for the frequent use of the word “experience,” but that is, in essence, what this is all about.

1. Experience

First up, when talking about experience-based marketing, I frequently come up against the preconceptions that Experience + Marketing = Event Marketing only and Customer + Experience = Customer Services only. But from a holistic, integrated marketing perspective, these are extremely narrow view points.

Your total brand experience is a string of various happenings going on before, during, and after purchasing and using your product. That chain is only as strong as its weakest link, and the experience of a bad product will not be saved by hiring a flash mob. Once you start thinking of these many nuances and links, you start opening up to new ways that people can experience your brand when exposed to it for the first, second, or umpteenth time.

2. Strategy

When venturing into new disciplines, it is easy to get lost in the many creative possibilities that become available. The same applies to experiential marketing. Bear in mind that it should be an extension of an overall marketing strategy-getting attention should not be the final goal. To be able to put in the time and effort that is needed, it needs to be understood within your organisation that this is a company investment, and success (or failure) should be defined within business parameters. Having these goals will help everyone on the team, regardless of their responsibility, keep in mind why you are doing what you are doing.

3. Message

Your advertising and communication core messages typically spearhead your marketing communications. Who are you? What do you do? What difference do you make in people’s lives? What tagline and superlatives can you create to add emotional value to your brand?

Rather than having people hear or read those words, however, the aim now is to create an experience that allows people to formulate those words themselves, even though they may not be the exact phrases a copywriter would use. It is about the core of the message, and how that can be translated into an experience. If your key value and message is that you keep people safe, how can you create an experience that lets them feel that safety? Or the opposite, to make your point? If it is feeling beautiful, how do you let them experience that, if only for a moment? The answer can be as creative as you would like it to be, just keep it relevant to your values, so your brand does not get lost in the process.

4. Emotion

In experiential marketing-as in good advertising-connections with your customer base are created using emotions. The obvious ones are those of fun and wonder. However, a great experience when applied to marketing is a memorable and transformative one: memorable, because you want your message to stick, and transformative, because you want people to take specific action. By focusing on this, you have a whole array of emotions to choose from for your experience. Bear in mind, too, that when you put people in the centre of your experience, emotion will be amplified, compared to the relative distance when watching on TV. You will also need to decide which feelings you want to stay with people, so that your strategic goals can be achieved through their actions.

5. Design

As mentioned above, a great experience is not just one event, it is a string of small experiences that make up the total. Designing and producing an experience is challenging and demands a lot of new skills and competencies. Do not get discouraged by the complexity. Within the marketing communications discipline lies a secret weapon that lets you design an experience with words-the narrative. If you describe what should happen in a step-by-step manner as an “experiential narrative,” you will create a common description and platform for everyone on the team to work from. The experiential narrative, perhaps along with sketches of scenarios, is also your best chance of getting decision-makers and budget allocators to understand what you are creating. Just don’t forget those strategic goals when presenting.

6. Communication

While communicating and documenting the experience you have created, ensure that this becomes a useful addition to a comprehensive, integrated marketing mix. Otherwise you risk any experiential marketing work you do inadvertently becoming “the best thing no one ever knew about.” This is even more important if your experience is temporary. You will need to make certain that enough people are attracted to it, and that you can tell the story of it afterwards. The power of your experience lies not only with the people having experienced it, and wanting to experience it again somehow, but also with those who would have loved to experience it themselves. The latter are usually the significantly larger group. Sharing the story of your experience is needed to bring everyone on board, and will bring your efforts full circle.

Invitation from the author: if you are interested in learning more about the potential and possibilities of experiential marketing, you are invited to AdventureLAB’s free online seminar in September: https://experiencelab20160913.eventbrite.com