During the course of this year and beyond it will be vital for organisations, small and medium businesses alike to focus on creating seamless customer experiences online.
Essentially Customer experience is a totality of cognitive, affective, sensory, and behavioural consumer responses during all stages of the consumption process including pre-purchase, consumption, and post-purchase stages. Any business that excels in this area and harnesses the power of creativity will become stronger than ever before.
Ambitious brands have implemented experiential marketing strategies for a countless or extremely great number of things and of purposes such as creating unique customer brand experiences, capturing data, generating leads, raising awareness and building loyalty. This ground-breaking marketing approach has achieved phenomenal results through immediate feedback, data collection and research.
Experiential marketing campaigns that integrate digital mixed media i.e. social media, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, augmented reality, alternative email marketing and mobile technology will dominate the marketing landscape in the next coming 10 years.
Netflix in recent years capitalised on the snapchat face-swap trend with a fun outdoor ad campaign that lets people swap faces with their favourite TV and film characters. To get the ‘face-swap’ to work, participants had to stand in a specific spot next to the character on the poster and take a selfie using the Snapchat app. The app then instantly ‘swapped their face’ with the likes of Kevin Spacey's Francis Underwood, Ellie Kemper's Kimmy Schmidt and Wagner Moura's Pablo Escobar. Netflix encouraged people to share their selfies using #NetflixSwap.
Your digital marketing and experiential marketing efforts can fuel each other in multiple ways. But the integration must feel natural.
So what is digital experiential marketing?
In essence digital experiential marketing is a two - way experience - oriented strategy. A successful integration of digital marketing and experiential marketing. This integrated methodology is constantly engaging target audiences at their will through brand- relevant communications that adds value.
A digital experiential marketing campaign is built around one ‘big idea’ that should involve two - way communication between the brand and the target audience in real time and remotely, therefore featuring a live brand experience at its core and using digital to amplify it.
Digital experiential marketing is taking a brand experience and using digital methods to promote it while at the same time creating brand relevant two - way engagement with the target audience.
All experiential strategies should bring the brand personality to life , create an emotional connection with participants, and be relevant to the target audience’s lifestyle and aspirations. You should always have an exponential element or a talking point that inspires word of mouth and strives to attain maximum reach while maintaining quality engagement.
Upmarket grocer Waitrose transformed its much-loved annual food and drinks fair into a four-day virtual experience. Celebrating food and drinks virtually, they filled it with 40 sessions which included kitchen skills Michelin-quality masterclasses with the world’s best chefs, cooking lessons from the revered Waitrose Cookery School, inspiring talks from luminaries like Heston Blumenthal, as well as talks, demonstrations, and tastings from partners.
Experiences bring to life brand personalities by creating situations in which the consumer participates in interactive experiences, automatically affiliating those emotional values with the product and its brand.
Zappar Teamed up with Shazam and Fanta, in a collaboration with Anthem Worldwide to create a unique AR component to Fanta’s takeover campaign. Delivered through the Shazam app, teens were able to scan Shazam codes on Fanta packs for the chance to win an awesome prize and unlock unique Face-filters.
Teens could choose from 12 face-filters and create their own unique Fanta personality, with the option to share to social media with selected selfies being displayed in Fanta’s follow-up OOH campaign. In addition, they could unlock pin-codes from Fanta bottles to be entered in a prize draw.
Conclusion
According to a financeonline.com report 2020/21 the number one most successful marketing tactic for industry professionals is experiential & events (38.3%) followed by digital advertising (19.7%) and content marketing (12.4%) respectively.
The digital experiential marketing approach should be tailored to fit the business objectives. Every brand, product or business has unique resource capacity, needs and goals. If you also take into consideration your consumers aspirations and lifestyles there is little doubt that the digital experiential marketing methodology will take on increasing importance in this digital age as technology and social media platforms continue to advance with better functionalities and analytics to measure return on investment.
Experiential marketing invites your consumers to participate in a branded, interactive event, even if it's remote. This is an enormous brand’s opportunity to stimulate all their senses through personalised experiences and two-way communication. Its also an opportunity to build impactful brand awareness while creating long lasting relationships.
Ultimately a marketer’s number one goal is to have people joyously engaging with their brand, becoming active advocates and maintaining a deep emotional connection with the brand right?
Do you create brand experiences to engage your consumers?
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