Event planners know a secret: traditional marketing will give you lackluster results. And all that social media marketing? You’ll get a few clicks, but you can do so much more. Why not give your audience an experience instead?
Experiential marketing helps you forge genuine connections with your audience through immersive experiences. At the same time, you give your audience a deeper insight into your brand.
Why Experiential Marketing?
Print advertising, along with TV and radio spots, have been the mainstay of advertising for decades. Now, we’ve added social media campaigns, Google ads, and other forms of paid online advertisements. They’re tried-and-true, effective ways to get your marketing messages out there. In fact, most of your marketing ideas probably use these traditional marketing methods. But as audiences have grown more sophisticated, they’ve become less receptive to traditional marketing.
Unfortunately, too many event marketers have chosen the old traditional marketing. Maybe they create a booth where someone can walk up to and read the placards. Or a virtual event where an attendee sits in and listens to speaker after speaker. For all the marketing effort, your event ROI might be minimal.
Traditional marketing campaigns are one-way interactions. Information flows from an advertising message to its target audience. With the exception of a few iconic campaigns, in the long term such advertisements are mostly forgettable. Those traditional campaigns do their job in the moment, but they don’t leave lasting memories.
Why? Because your audience never interacts with them. You remember your own experiences best. Get people talking about your brand with memorable experiences.
Experiential Marketing Means Actively Engaging Branded Interactions
Experiential marketing is different. It’s a two-way interaction that gives audiences an active role. They don’t sit, passively absorbing brand messages. With this kind of marketing, the audience chooses to take part. And because they’re actively choosing to engage, they’re much more receptive to marketing messages.
A successful experiential marketing campaign sparks a deeper level of engagement with a brand. The user enters into an immersive experience with your brand. Each experience aims to target all five senses, when possible. These experiences trigger an emotional response. That response makes branded messaging more memorable, more effective, and much more pleasurable.
Create Positive Associations that Build Brand Loyalty
That’s an important part of what makes experiential marketing so successful. Positive brand interactions are vital for building brand loyalty. A great branded experience creates long-lasting positive associations. These associations help your audience feel a genuine connection with your brand.
More than Brand Activations
Go beyond brand activations. While brand activations might be part of your experiential marketing campaign, you can do more.
A brand activation campaign has a simple goal: to allow a potential customer to test your product or service. They will then see for themselves that your company’s advertising statements are trustworthy.
An experiential marketing strategy has a slightly different goal: to build a positive long-term relationship with a potential customer by creating a memorable, branded experience. Typically, you might also provide the opportunity to interact with your products and services in the process. In that way, brand activations are often a piece of an experiential marketing campaign.
At ProGlobalEvents, we love to see brand activations as part of your experiential marketing campaigns. And, we want to see the long-term relationships built from a well-crafted, immersive experience. That adds up to more than product testing. Ultimately, both marketing strategies aim for more engaged consumers with positive brand impressions. We can help you craft an experience that delivers on both goals.
Experiential Marketing…
- Invites your audience to learn about your brand through tangible branded experiences
- Provides personalized experiences based on the choices and interactions of the attendee
- Lets your audience interact with your brand
- Gives your audience a new way to understand your brand
- Helps to humanize your brand, making it more than words and images on an advertising page
- Gives your brand authenticity
Types of Experiential Marketing: Live, Virtual, & Hybrid Experiences
A branded experience can be fun, unusual, exciting, educating, and inspiring. Most of all, it’s about engaging your audience and creating memories. Each memory creates associations that build on their relationship to your brand. Take a look at the experiential marketing examples for each type of event below.
Live Branded Experiences that Take Advertising Up a Notch or Two
Experiential marketing is the perfect way to get to know your audience, and let them get to know your brand.
Take your brand outside the box with an engaging, entertaining branded experience. You can create a live branded experience at just about any event: trade shows, corporate events, entertainment venues, or mobile pop-up events. It is all about meeting your audience wherever they happen to be, and injecting something special into their day.
Invite your audience to walk into a booth or a seminar. Then awe them with every feature designed to make an impression, convey a feeling, and draw them into an interaction.
Take a look at the following experiential marketing example from Zillow, an online real estate marketplace. Note the lawn chairs and every immersive element to create a sense of “home” and comfort.
Virtual Event Experiences: Welcome to the Metaverse
The traditional branded experience happens at a live event. However, there are many ways of giving your audience an immersive experience. You might think of the experience of walking inside a live event as the epitome of experiential marketing. But technology is changing the rules. With the advent of the metaverse, 3-dimensional immersive experiences are possible at the virtual level too.
With virtual events fast becoming a staple of the industry, the race is on to create the biggest, best, most engaging branded virtual experiences. The success of the first large-scale virtual events has proven that in-person isn’t the only option.
Virtual events have huge potential for creating immersive branded experiences. The most sophisticated virtual events platforms are more like virtual worlds. Attendees can create their own custom avatars and explore a virtual venue just like they would a live one. It’s even possible to create 3D environments with live speakers and insert them right into the virtual world.
It’s all part of what’s being broadly termed the “metaverse,” a new way to think about, talk about, and interact with cyberspace. The metaverse is developing hand-in-hand with virtual reality and augmented reality technology. However, the metaverse itself isn’t tied to any specific piece of tech. It’s more about how we interact with technology.
As a society, we’re spending more time in virtual spaces, and increasingly, within immersive 3D virtual spaces. The metaverse invites us to imagine what we can do in those virtual spaces. It opens up whole new worlds of possibility for experiential marketing.
Moreover, a virtual event or a virtual component to your live event provides new avenues for measuring event success. Every person that enters your virtual event leaves a digital trail, providing ample data for you to analyze.
Hybrid Event Experiences for a Global Audience
Hybrid events are a synergistic mix that combines the best of both live and virtual events.
Hybrid branded experiences exist simultaneously in the physical world and the virtual one. It’s similar to how augmented reality takes elements that exist in the real world, and adds digital enhancements.
At a trade show, for instance, a hybrid experiential booth can provide a branded experience at the show for attendees who go to the venue. But the virtual audience doesn’t have to miss out on the fun. By creating a digital version of the live experience, every attendee can visit the booth, no matter where they happen to be.
Most branded experiences happen at a specific location, and it’s only those who are lucky enough to live nearby who can participate. With this technology, branded experiences don’t have to be limited to a specific location—they can be for a global audience as well as a local one.
The hybrid experience is perfect for global brands, and for brands that want to take their messaging to a global audience for the first time. Hosting simultaneous live and virtual experiences can be an incredible way to introduce your brand to a new audience. You can make a big splash in doing so.
Take Your Brand to New Heights with ProGlobalEvents
Experiential marketing offers unique advantages for brands that want stronger audience relationships. ProGlobalEvents can plan and execute your vision from start to finish.
ProGlobalEvents has 30 years of experience in the events industry. We excel at creating engaging, interactive, and immersive experiences. We are able to provide these experiences both in the physical world and the virtual one. We can provide you:
- Experts in experiential marketing with decades of experience
- Conceptualization and design
- Live venue/site selection
- Contract negotiation, staffing, and labor management
- Event planning and design
- Exhibit, mobile exhibit, and display design
- Live site setup, including A/V, electrical, and technical expertise
- A powerful 3D virtual events platform that supports a variety of content types
- 3D studio technology that puts real people in custom-designed digital environments
From engaging live experiences…
We team up with our sister company, ProExhibits, to design and manufacture displays and exhibits to inform and inspire. We design exhibits that power strong brand relationships and showcase everything that makes your brand special.
Or, we take our decades of experience to create an entire experience out of your next corporate event. You can expect employees who leave your experiential event (re)inspired by your brand and the work you’re doing.
…to immersive virtual worlds
In the virtual world, we can create immersive, interactive, and engaging experiences. We set up the virtual venues, exhibits, and entertainment, with XtendLive, our all-in-one 3D virtual events platform. Take your marketing experience into the metaverse and captivate a global audience.
Put ProGlobalEvents to Work on Your Experiential Marketing Campaign
Make experiential marketing a core of your marketing strategy, when you partner with ProGlobalEvents. Experiential marketing lets you connect with your audience and sends your brand reputation soaring. Whether it’s live, virtual, or hybrid, ProGlobalEvents can help you make your next campaign a resounding success. Contact us today and let’s get started.