Experiential Marketing: What is it? How to measure it? And, Examples?

 

What is experiential marketing?

 

One of my favorite marketing strategies is experiential marketing. It is fun, memorable, and is one of the few strategies that is “hands on” with the consumer. It is sometimes called event marketing, live marketing, and participation marketing. It is a strategy that gives the consumer direct engagement and offers the consumer to experience the brand in person. Instead of other usual and passive strategies that are based around providing a message, the strategies are based on the idea that the consumer should actively be apart of the brand or product.

 

How to measure?

 

It is easy to measure other marketing strategies, an e-mail campaign gets measure based on how many e-mails were sent, how many people open the e-mails, how many people open the link, and most importantly, how many viewers are converted into sales.

Almost every other strategy is easy to measure. Experiential is a bit more difficult because it is a bit more different than other strategies. There is no social media metric, or television statistic, or click through rate. After a experiential marketing campaign at an event, your business can check if online impressions rise and check if any publications mention your campaign. The more buzz that is generated from your campaign, the better. Furthermore, you can promote a hashtag during your experiential campaign and track social media metrics to see if consumers are using the hashtag. If an experiential campaign is successful, your business should be seeing a rise in new customers. Tracking how many new customers you earn after an experiential campaign may be a valid method to track your strategies’ success. Lastly, the most important measure to determine if your strategy was a success, track sales. If your sales decline or stay stagnant after an experiential campaign, your campaign was probably not successful.

 

Some examples?

 

1. Samsung built “Samsung Studios” to showcase their new Samsung products at the 2012 Olympics
2. Mountain Dew hosted booths in festivals across the country providing drinks, games, and prize giveaways
3. IKEA hosted a giant sleepover that had 100,000 people in attendance
4. LeanCuisine offers people to measure themselves in accomplishments not in weight

Experiential marketing is my favorite because it allows me, the marketer to have personal interactions with my customers. It is one of the few strategies where it is an active and personal experience. A good experiential campaign can have huge results and returns.