5 Core Attributes of Experiential Marketing

Experiential Marketing Defined 

apple coreExperiential marketing enables prospects and customers to interact and connect with your offering in a way that creates memorable branded experiences. Based on these brand-related encounters, customers become more connected to and invested in your offering. This results in increased awareness and sales for B2C, B2B and NFP (not-for-profit) brands.

The growth and interaction of social media, content marketing and mobile provide an environment that’s ripe for experiential marketing. As a result, these branded encounters augmented through mobile devices seamlessly produce highly effective social media engagement that yields content marketing in the form of images and video, social media commentary and ratings and reviews.

5 Elements of Experiential Marketing

To better understand how to apply experiential marketing to your brand’s social media, content and mobile marketing, here are the five core attributes.

1. Experiential marketing makes your brand relatable

Think of a brand experience like a children’s museum where kids can walk up and interact with exhibits rather than just look at paintings, photographs and sculpture. As any docent will tell you to get children to understand art you must translate it to terms they understand and can relate to. For example, when my nephew was three, my mother and I took him to see the Temple of Dendur at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My mother asked my nephew what the temple made him think of. His response: a puppet show since the stone in the back was cut out like a puppet stage so visitors could see the interior of the structure.

2. Experiential marketing makes your brand contextual important

The use of connected devices locates your potential customer in space and time. This translates to the need to create social media and content marketing that’s contextually relevant to where your prospect is and what he or she is doing. For marketers, this means truly understanding your marketing persona and your social media buyer persona.

3. Experiential marketing makes your brand emotionally relevant

In the process of experiencing your brand, potential buyers connect emotionally with your products and services. As a result, they gather additional purchase-related information that goes beyond a marketing defined explanation of benefits. The experience narrows the time lapse between the zero, first and second moments of truth. (Here’s an explanation of the 4 moments of truth for marketing.) Specifically, prospects gather hands-on practical knowledge of your brand.

4. Experiential marketing makes your brand talkworthy

Further, and more important from a marketing perspective, is that prospects and customers talk passionately about your offering creating word-of-mouth both in real life and on social media platforms. This amplifies your credibility because in a world where customers don’t trust advertising, it’s not what you the marketer say but rather what your customers talk about.

5. Experiential marketing makes your brand social

With the increased ownership and use of mobile devices, both smartphones and tablets, consumers are more able to enhance and share their product experiences. In the process, they can gathering additional product information, capture images and videos, connect with family, friends and colleagues, and share their opinions via social media. From this perspective, the amazing popularity of the ephemeral social media mobile app Snapchat that enables users to send friends photographs and videos that disappear within a short time period without a trace makes sense.

 

Experiential marketing makes your brand relevant to your prospects and customers by leveraging the combined power of social media, content marketing and mobile.

What is your definition of experiential marketing? How have you used it to increase your organization’s brand awareness and sales?

We’d like to wish our Jewish readers a very Happy New Year. May it be a sweet one and may it bring the world closer to peace.

Happy Marketing,
Heidi Cohen

This post is dedicated to my mother who became a docent after she retired and was a kid magnet in any museum. She taught me the power of making complex ideas into digestible chunks of information.


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