It is quite obvious that with the unprecedented 2020/21 Lockdown of cities, towns and villages around the world, digital transformation has been accelerated globally ultimately forcing business to adopt technology and agile methodologies to try and stay competitive. Digital Marketing has grown tremendously and enables companies to reach out to their customers while being able to observe their online behaviours. Even though digital marketing is effective in this capacity it still needs to be augmented with strong experiential marketing in order for it to be even more impactful. In case you are wondering why that is the case? Please consider the following.
One of the most critical elements your business needs to adopt is moving away from seeing buyers as users or demographics but human beings. People need and want to connect with brands on a physical and emotional level. Business leaders and marketers need to win over consumers with unforgettable experiences, and not only will they be converted, but they will also become brand ambassadors. Experiential marketing opens people’s hearts as well as their wallets.
Below is why digital experiential marketing will help you achieve your marketing objectives. 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.
1. Appeal To The Five Senses Of The Target Audience
A human being has five senses: smell, touch, taste, hearing, and sight. Therefore, experiential marketing is simply the process of taking advantage and winning the attention and trust of your consumers by appealing to each of these five senses. So this is the key to digital experiential marketing success; create fully immersive experiences that incorporate one or more of the five senses: sight, sound, touch, taste and smell that engage consumers or your target audience remotely.
The most successful sensory marketing campaigns educate consumers and provide them with something useful and memorable. They change the way the consumer thinks and feels about a product or brand. People want encounters that trigger their imagination and stimulate them in unpredictable ways. The secret to doing that is to amplify the five senses through a creative brand experience and boost the brand experience with digital media.
Remote brand experiences and digital experiential campaigns can still allow consumers to touch, hear, see, taste and smell the product if you consider a live streamed virtual cook off brand experience.
85% of consumers are likely to buy after participating in events and brand experiences.
75% of online traffic will only visit websites on the first page of search results. (HubSpot, 2020a)
2. Brand Exposure
In a way, the COVID-19 global situation has been a dream scenario for digital marketing. Globally e-commerce spending is seeing month-on-month growth.
Global B2C e-commerce sales are expected to reach $4.5 trillion by 2021. (Shopify Plus, 2019)
32% of global shoppers plan to increase online purchases through social media. (Statista, 2020)
But with this, the digital space has become increasingly competitive and brands need creative solutions to stand-out. Creative campaigns and developing a strong brand proposition has never been more important in a crowded online market.
Experiential marketing as a discipline of designing unique, meaningful and memorable interactions between brands and people. Digital Marketing which is fantastic for creating brand awareness, and social media providing a creative interactive option with the target audience before, during, and after the brand experience. Combined all these interactions allow your brand to be searchable, visible, top of mind and on more feeds for longer, increasing overall brand awareness, leads, data, customer loyalty and bringing brand personality to life .
Brands are also implementing AR campaigns like never before. Reports indicate Brand awareness increases by as much as 70% through the use of Augmented reality. While many brands are still using AR to engage their followers and increase brand awareness, the benefits of AR as a conversion tool are only increasing.
There were only 101,000 smart augmented reality glasses shipped in 2018. The number is expected to grow to 19.7 million units annually by 2025. The market for smart AR glasses is already driven by industrial and enterprise applications. The technology will further see increased use in the consumer sector, expectedly as a tool for more immersive customer brand experiences. (Omdia)
75% of consumers expect retailers to offer an augmented reality experience.
Your target audience is looking for authentic, personal moments to share. When you create a brand experience that resonates with your brand's values and brand personality, with the inspiration from the aspirations and lifestyle of the consumer or target audience at every campaign touch point. Your digital experiential marketing will soar creating brand awareness and brand advocacy like never before.
3. Word Of Web
Experiential marketing creates brand advocacy. It drives word of the web ( or simply word-of-mouth) through personal recommendations that are the result of consumers feeling that the brand experience added value and connected with them through relevant interaction. 51% of people exposed to experiential marketing go on to recommend that brand typically to minimum 4 other people.
Word-of-mouth is extremely powerful because everyone trusts the word of their friends and family members over a brand that is advertising their products. If we do our jobs right, the by-product of a great experiential campaign is content: natural, personal, shareable content! With digital experiential marketing, your brand experience or marketing campaign doesn’t look or sound like an advertisement, which makes users happy to share your company with their social network.
77% of marketers stated that they harness experiential marketing as a crucial part of any brand’s advertising strategies. (Event Marketer)
92% of brand-side respondents believe integrating experiential marketing within the overall sales and marketing funnel is vital to their success. (Agency EA, 2019
4. Extended Brand Experience Life Span
There's no question about it! We all love sharing memorable experiences across our social channels. That is why brands need to learn to speak to the culture and community, not just to demographics. A Connector, relationship broker, community enabler, human interaction catalyst, these are the few but yet powerful roles a brand can play in people's lives while executing an integrated digital experiential marketing campaign.
For example with dedicated hashtags, you can share events widely by using experiential marketing and catapult the brand reach online, and even offline. Again! what is the one thing all digital marketers want more of? Content Right? That being the case, One brand experience can provide content for an entire year when planned accordingly. This continuous buzz around your brand and product sustains your company’s reputation and relevance, resulting in more people learning about your brand experience, your brand personality and product. This can all be done by sharing images from your brand experience and re-sharing what the target audience has commented on and about the brand experience. This will be a sustained two - way engagement with your company’s digital marketing team and the target audience via responses and direct messages.
Experiential marketing is a goldmine for user-generated content (UGC). Customers trust user-generated content more than branded content; think of it as a visual testimonial for your brand. The more user generated content you share during a brand experience, the better. The content generated for your brand at a brand experience can carry a lot of value for your digital marketing plans going forward.
5. ROI
Every brand or business expects and demands both ROI and also clear proof that the return on investment was triggered by their experiential activity. It is very important that a brand experience is evaluated, but whilst that is encouraged, economic challenges and the unpredictability of the current world events has made budgets to get tighter and tighter to an extent businesses are forced more than ever before to go without an evaluation element integrated into their campaign.
It still goes without saying demonstrating experiential marketing ROI is important because without measuring this, you are essentially marketing blind. If you do not measure the success of your campaigns over time, then you won’t know what’s working and what isn’t. And if you don’t measure the ROI of your campaigns, you won’t know for sure if you’re wasting money or spending your marketing budget wisely.
Technology can facilitate an amazing range of both face-to-face and online (remote) two - way interactions. When digital is integrated and used effectively to interact with your target audience, to gather data, educate, demonstrate, or provoke a reaction and amplify your brand experience it leaves traces of data.
Ultimately, the best way to measure a digital experiential marketing ROI will depend on what your unique goals are. Some of the examples of campaign objectives may be to create a memorable brand experience , drive product trial , drive word-of-mouth , bring the brand personality to life, Increase sales, position the brand, target a new audience and so forth. It is really important to adapt the content of your brand experience idea to match the experiential objectives. Because each live brand experience can differ greatly from the next, it is important to put together systems and mechanisms that facilitate measuring how successful a campaign is. The measurement of your live brand experience’s objectives, and the results will contribute to the overall evaluation of the experiential marketing campaign as a whole which will consist of the live brand experience channel and possibly other amplification channels i.e social media, email or AR. The amplification channels should still be measured using standard metrics of each channel respectively.
With that in mind, here is a quick list of metrics that you can use to measure digital experiential marketing ROI based on the tactics you use:
Email – Open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, conversions, and leads acquired.
Social Media – Engagement rates, clicks and click-through rate, conversions, leads acquired, and new fans or followers.
Hashtags - Volume of hashtag mentions, volume of interactions your hashtag accumulate, social media reach of mentions containing a hashtag, the most influential authors and the most interactive authors
Landing Pages – Traffic, unique visitors, returning visitors, total page views, time spent on page, actions taken, and conversions.
Blogs – Traffic, clicks, time spent on page, unique visitors, returning visitors, actions taken, and conversions.
Augmented Reality - Number of scans, Number of app downloads, Instant Experience view time, Effect shares, Augmented reality boosted via social media,
Each system or mechanism for measurement should be tailored to the “Big Idea” - the live brand experience and its available resources and technology, to enable them to be built seamlessly without interrupting the natural flow of the live brand experience.
85% of consumers are likely to buy after participating in events and brand experiences.
48% of consumers are more likely to buy a new product if they can try it first.
Conclusion
A great idea turned into a captivating and engaging remote brand experience stimulates consumer's five senses. It creates and increases brand awareness, gives consumers and the target audience something useful and memorable to embrace. When your target audience and consumers are stimulated they will tell their friends and family members about the experience they had with your brand. At this moment they have now become your brand ambassadors online and offline. They will proceed to click on your emails, share blog posts, podcasts, comments, tweets with your branded hashtag, branded selfies, pictures, AR interactive content and videos. Your business will benefit from the generated, natural and sharable content which you can further add to your future digital marketing plans.
Because of the remote nature of the digital experiential marketing methodology it is anchored on the ever evolving digital technology, which offers versatility and analytics tools that can measure the return on investment (ROI) of each campaign.
The digital experiential methodology fits in seamlessly with whatever your consumers and target audience are doing, which makes them fully engaged, because it creates an emotional connection with participants, and it is relevant to the target audience’s lifestyle and aspirations.
Now, more than ever, brands need to seriously consider this as a part of their marketing strategy if they want to survive the COVID-19 crisis and flourish eventually.
Do you think digital marketing with an experiential element can help you achieve this year's marketing objectives?
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