Marketing once meant billboards, magazine spreads, TV spots, and newspaper ads. The digital age expanded this toolkit, adding digital display ads, sponsored search results, targeted ads, and email marketing to the mix.
Reaching new audiences has never been easier. But today’s consumers—barraged with marketing messages—have more demands on their attention than ever before. Experiential marketing allows you to forge authentic connections between your brand and its community. Here’s what you need to know to engage your customers.
What is experiential marketing?
Experiential marketing—also known as engagement marketing, live marketing, participation marketing, and event marketing—focuses on engaging consumers by inviting them to participate in memorable, immersive brand experiences. Think pop-up shops, virtual experiences, brand activations, and live events.
The goal is to build meaningful, emotional ties between your brand and your target audience through a direct connection, often involving personal participation. Experiential marketing campaigns can be one-off projects, and they’re typically part of a broader marketing strategy that includes traditional marketing tactics.
Experiential vs. traditional marketing: What’s the difference?
Experiential marketing differs significantly from traditional marketing, particularly in its goals and performance metrics. For example, while display ad campaigns prioritize direct key performance indicators (KPIs) like cost per click, cost per thousand impressions, and conversion rates, experiential campaigns typically try to increase brand awareness or foster long-term customer loyalty—effects that are more difficult to measure and attribute. Rather than track direct KPIs for experiential marketing, you can measure the success of an experiential campaign with indirect indicators like social media engagement, participant feedback, and foot traffic.
Benefits of experiential marketing
- Builds emotional connection
- Creates memorable experiences
- Enables direct interaction
- Offers differentiation
“Experiential marketing is all about bringing a brand to life, and today’s consumers are all about experiences,” says Naomi Ratner Oshry, director of business development and communications at experiential agency 3CS, which has worked with brands including Hulu, Sports Illustrated, and Disney+. “If companies do experiential marketing right, it can be very impactful with lots of unique benefits.”
Here are a few of those benefits:
Builds emotional connection
When an interaction resonates emotionally with a customer, they remember it. A winning experiential marketing strategy creates positive emotional ties between your brand and target audience. This emotional bond with your company can translate into increased brand loyalty. Loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, organically share their experiences, and recommend your brand to friends and family.
“Someone can have an amazing time at an experiential activation and not make an immediate purchase. However, a year later when they’re interested in buying X product, they’ll think back to the awesome hands-on experience with your company and purchase with you.”
“It’s a longer-term approach,” Naomi says. “Someone can have an amazing time at an experiential activation and not make an immediate purchase. However, a year later when they’re interested in buying X product, they’ll think back to the awesome hands-on experience with your company and purchase with you.”
Creates memorable experiences
Today’s consumers love to share experiences on social media, especially when those experiences are surprising or delightful. Standout experiential marketing efforts can generate online buzz and free word-of-mouth marketing—pulling in an even wider audience’s attention.
All this can become user-generated content (UGC) for your content marketing strategy; think of photos of enthusiastic attendees at your event and videos of them enjoying the hands-on experience. Resharing UGC on your brand’s social media accounts can help you save on marketing expenses and build trust with potential customers—organic, non-sponsored messaging feels authentic because it is.
Enables direct interaction
“Traditional avenues like banner ads or Instagram can be effective parts of a marketing strategy, but with those, there’s no interaction,” Naomi points out. “Today’s consumers value experiences and engagement.”
Successful experiential campaigns foster direct engagement between brands and customers through in-person events or virtual experiences. Use these interactions to learn more about your customers and get valuable insights into their preferences, product usage, and challenges. Building genuine customer relationships lets you tailor yourmarketing strategy and perhaps even adjust your product to better meet needs.
Offers differentiation
Ecommerce markets tend to be highly competitive, and small businesses can struggle to stand out. Experiential marketing strategies enable differentiation from competitors through unique, unforgettable experiences.
These on-brand experiences can create brand awareness by capturing the attention of potential future customers and setting you apart. So, when it comes time to buy, yours is the company customers remember.
Experiential marketing examples
Red Bull Stratos: extreme livestream
Red Bull drew eyeballs and headlines worldwide for sponsoring a highly extreme event: Felix Baumgartner’s record-breaking skydive from the edge of space. The company livestreamed the dive, leveraging technology to create an exciting experience for viewers and a memorable global spectacle.
Barbie Selfie Generator: online AI personalization
The website BarbieSelfie.ai invites users to upload a selfie and find themselves in Barbie’s world, slotting them into scenes next to Margot Robbie’s character singing in her iconic pink Corvette. This immersive, lighthearted campaign employs the novelty of AI to generate social-media-tailored content.
IKEA Sleepover: in-person shopping adventure
IKEA stores in the UK, the US, Canada, Sweden, and Australia invited contest-winning customers to spend the night in-store, sleeping in areas personalized to their interests. A routine shopping experience became an unforgettable overnight escapade at IKEA. The event showcased the brand’s ingenuity while inspiring winners to create their own content and the media to cover the winners’ nighttime abodes.
Experiential marketing tips
- Determine your goals
- Set your approximate budget
- Encourage audience participation
- Align the event with brand values
- Choose a compatible agency partner
When setting up your experiential marketing campaign, consider these best practices:
Determine your goals
An experiential strategy differs from traditional marketing because it may not lead to immediate product sales. Instead, goals include getting your brand name in front of potential future customers, sharing free samples of a new product, driving social engagement, and increasing intangible assets like brand goodwill.
“Objectives can vary from client to client, but remember what’s most important in experiential is bringing the brand to life for consumers,” Naomi says. “When consumers walk away, they should have a deep understanding of what the brand stands for and feel that their experience was impactful.”
Set your approximate budget
The splashiest experiential marketing examples may be high-budget events from big-name companies, but impactful experiences need not always be costly.
“You can have a great effect with a limited budget,” Naomi says. “It’s a matter of the creative process and determining what makes an activation a success for you. The right agency partner can think outside the box, fit your budget, and come up with a plan to align with your brand and objectives.”
Encourage audience participation
The goal with experiential marketing is to create a memorable experience—and passive spectating often isn’t exciting. Rather, tap into interactive experiences that engage the senses: scavenger hunts, taste tests, virtual experiences, contests for the best user-generated content. By inviting your customers to participate, you’re transforming them from spectators into part of a community doing something together.
Align the event with brand values
Any experiential campaign should align closely with your brand identity and core values—like sustainability, social responsibility, ethical sourcing, and inclusivity. Today’s consumers want to understand what a brand stands for, and they expect authenticity and consistency around the experience. For example, an environmentally minded company should offer product samples in biodegradable material, not single-use plastic.
Choose a compatible agency partner
If you have the budget to work with a marketing agency, write up a request for proposal (RFP), which is a document a company issues when it’s looking to hire someone to perform a service. Your RFP should include your brand overview, what you hope to achieve through an experiential marketing event, and your budget.
Send your RFP to experiential marketing or event agencies you’re interested in. Agencies can then submit responses detailing how they would fulfill your request, sharing an overview of their ideas and approaches in a bid to win your business.
A great RFP response doesn’t necessarily mean the agency is a good fit. “Meet with agencies and find someone you vibe with, because personalities are important in this work,” Naomi says. “An agency may provide great ideas, but if they don’t feel like a good fit for a long-term relationship, it might make sense to find someone else.”
Experiential marketing FAQ
Why is experiential marketing better than traditional marketing?
Experiences can create emotional connections that engender brand loyalty. They also encourage active participation, may inspire user-generated content and word-of-mouth amplification, and can help you differentiate your brand from competitors.
What is the biggest problem with experiential marketing?
Unlike traditional marketing, which typically involves straightforward success metrics like click-through rates, experiential marketing KPIs can be less clear. The core goal is to create impactful experiences for long-term loyalty, which is challenging to quantify.
What are elements of successful experiential marketing campaigns?
Winning experiential marketing experiences leave customers with a deep understanding of your brand, lasting memories, and a positive association that can lead to future sales.
