Experiential Marketing Delivers Engaged Consumers

Experiential marketing employs an arsenal of effective tactics ranging from nightlife marketing to campus activations, custom vehicle marketing to guerilla street teams, mall tours to word of mouth programs, and luxury marketing to publicity stunts.  Regardless of the tactic selected, there is one deliverable both client and agency agree is crucial — the engaged customer.

Without discounting the importance of acquiring new customers or re-engaging past customers (both essential), we believe experiential marketing can deliver results in the most sustained fashion by way of the long tail.   Be it the digital long tail of sustained content that feeds search, or the long tail of sales – all can be positively affected by events, experiences, and brand engagements that generate trial, consideration, adoration and conversation.

The Long Tail (image by Anup Shah)

Experiential Marketing Delivers Long Term ROI

The Advertising Research Foundation states in a recent study on experiential marketing that brand experiences “improve profitability by increasing both short-term sales and long-run brand demand… The tendency is to think they only have short-term impacts. On the contrary, the power of experiential marketing is shown in this study to go beyond short-term effects to generate a longer-term brand value.”

There isn’t a brand manager or CMO alive that would NOT want to get – and keep – 10-15% of their consumers “wagging.”  The lifetime consumers.  The new consumers interested in base, mainstay products.  The consumers interested in a company’s aggregate smaller product lines; and there’s good reason…Netflix being a great example.

Search engine optimization, word of mouth, and social media in general “wag” the Long Tail online with a constant supply of Flickr pics, blog comments, YouTube videos and comments, tweets and Facebook fan activity.  Brand generated content can get things started, but the real dividend of an experiential investment is consumer generated activity and its impact.

Experiential Marketing Delivers Lasting Relationships

Relationships begin with conversation, and at our shop that’s exactly what we sell.  We are conversant in sight, sound, scent, taste, touch, and the persuasive arts.

The Art of Conversation (image via tendaysontheisland.com)

It is in these conversations that brand advocacy is fostered, adopters become adorers, and new customers are won.  It is in these conversations that the prospects for a tail to grow long are greatly enhanced.  Brands can achieve both short-term and long-term goals with experiential marketing; it is a force multiplier in terms of real ROI…and that’s something to wag about.