What are the distinctive personality and emotional benefits of your brand that are important to your customers? This customer-centric brand positioning is your compass for guiding all of your marketing initiatives – especially experiential marketing or simply, the way you interact with your customers. When you communicate emotions like brand trust, comfort and credibility, you’re making your customers’ experiences more meaningful, memorable and certainly worthy to share with others.
Experiential Marketing is not a new concept.
While the term, experiential marketing, may be less familiar than some, the concept of attracting and engaging customers to try and/or use a product or service is widely understood. However, there are two motivating factors that make experiential marketing even more relevant today for building brand equity and awareness.
Emotional Branding – Priority one is to create and nourish a relationship with your customer. It starts with knowing what is most important to your customer. Knowing what they want, you move on to testing to discover in what ways they most readily respond. Once you’ve established a guide, you have a map to follow for all of your marketing initiatives. Part of this process includes experiential ‘branding’, which encompasses creating and driving sensory interactions with the customer that involve these feelings. This will emotionally influence their preferences, shape their perception of the brand and affect their satisfaction, loyalty and retention.
Digital Marketing – Thanks to digital marketing, you can, more easily than ever, capture, segment, learn and understand who your customers are and what they want. The interactive capabilities of social media marketing and other forms of digital marketing give customers a feeling of empowerment and a desire to experience a product or service on their own terms. The majority of people nowadays research online before making a purchasing decision. Also, getting advice from friends who have experienced the product/service is another advantage.
Experiential marketing reflects the growing importance of emphasizing emotions to build successful brands and the expanding opportunities to do so using digital media. Gone are the days of relying totally on trade shows, exhibition and industry-related events to grow your customer base. To attract and retain B2B customers in the digital age, you must use all of the tools available with online marketing: social media marketing, lead generation, SEO, search marketing, brand awareness – all skillfully integrated with experiential marketing know-how.