How to Implement Experiential Marketing Experiences for Events

‍If you haven’t heard of experiential marketing, you’ve definitely seen it. Remember Share a Coke? Or what about Google Photo’s Pay with a Photo?

These experiential marketing campaigns not only get people involved and interested in their products, but they do it in a way that unfolds naturally and sticks in user’s minds. While it can be done poorly, in a gimmicky way, this type of marketing will continue evolving as all of our devices become more connected. Particularly post-COVID. If your company isn’t already doing some form of experiential marketing, that’s ok - you’re here and Snapbar has built products to help.

What Types of Experiential Marketing Are Best?

When it comes to marketing your brand, the only limits are your imagination. Marketing can take all different forms. And people love unique, sticky ways of being nudged to buy products. I mean, who hasn’t quoted the World’s Most Interesting Man or hummed the tune to the Kit-Kat jingle?

Marketing is everywhere. But when you enter the realm of experiential marketing, it goes beyond just a catchy song or a phrase that turns into one of the most popular memes of all time. Experiential marketing isn’t about being salesy. It isn’t about being gimmicky. It’s about creating an experience around your brand that people will remember - and more importantly, that relates your brand or product to your target customers.

“The key is to make sure that your efforts hinge on creating unique, face-to-face experiences with your brand that give consumers the opportunity to interact with the brand in person.” -Molly Galetto

Being unique is a huge part of experiential marketing but it’s also about meeting your customers where they spend time online and giving them an intuitive, engaging experience that pulls someone in. We’ve all been there, quickly checking a notification on our phone and then 30 minutes later realizing we got sucked into some platform, feed, game, or click-bait headline we couldn’t resist. Experiential marketing should start with that type of natural interaction and then deliver a rewarding interaction that creates brand stickiness.

Experiential Marketing Solutions

We’ve highlighted that experiential campaigns should be easy to access and presented to users where they spend time, provide custom experiences that relate your brand, and give an incentive or reason for users to engage. According to Single Grain, all experiential marketing has three elements:

1. Active participation and engagement from the audience
2. Promotion of the brand’s message and values
3. Provides long-lasting value

Snapbar has built products around photo and video that can deliver just that.

Snapbar Snapshot is a web-based, fully customizable photo booth experience that users can easily access from a link or by scanning a QR code. But it’s also much more than a photo booth. Custom backgrounds, frames, stickers, and text allow brands make the experience immersive around a particular product, message, or cause and automatically display that content in a dynamic gallery that drives more UGC via the FOMO-effect. This experience could be a standalone microsite, embedded in existing web content, or directly integrated with an event platform. The result is a user-driven, self-propelling experience when executed well. Check out some of the unique photo experiences our customers have designed using Snapshot.

How Can You Use Experiential Marketing on Social Media?

Thanks to social media, it’s easier than ever to get your name and brand out into the world (and in front of hundreds of thousands of people) with a photo experience attached.But remember, “social media is a multiplier. You have to have the main event in order to multiply it.”

Consumers are getting savvier. They aren’t watching television with traditional commercials – they’re watching TikTok, YouTube, and endless content on connected TVs. These mediums are interactive and learn about the person and suggest the top content that people will be interested in.

That’s what your brand has to compete with. You have to create something that will reach people. Will be shared. Will make a difference. That is experiential marketing.

Experiential Marketing Provides Long-Lasting Value

‍One of the best things about experiential marketing is in its name. It’s all about the experience. Consumers are valuing experience and feelings over physical items and clutter more than ever before. When you implement these types of strategies, you’re giving your audience something so much more than free products and services (although, definitely keep doing that, like Ottawa!)

As much as feelings and experiences are at the heart of experiential marketing, people feeling good doesn’t help you with your marketing. Making sure you have memorable hashtags, you develop incentives and share them on your brand channels, and you encourage people to create content and share are the best ways to make sure you get the most out of your experiential marketing.

It’s amorphous and big, but it can also be smaller and tangible. We’ve shared some examples from bigger brands and recognizable names, but your experiential marketing doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. In fact, EventMB has a great section in their Experiential Marketing blog about how to do successful experiential marketing on a budget!

When you follow the three principles, your experiential marketing campaign won’t be forgotten and will have a huge ROI in brand loyalty, social impressions, and long term stickiness.

1. Active participation and engagement from the audience
2. Promotion of the brand’s message and values
3. Incentivize sharing and buy-in to drive long-lasting value

Snapbar can and would love to help with all of these things for your brand! Contact us today to start a conversation, demo our products, or learn more about pricing and custom experiences.

‍