The internet is competitive and oversaturated — even more so than just a few years ago. You used to be able to push a social media campaign or invest in an organic SEO strategy to get your business’s name in front of potential customers, and now those same marketing objectives won’t yield nearly as much as they once would have.

Of course, there are plenty of reasons for this. For one, paid media is becoming a necessary spend, with total spending on social media advertising alone projected to reach $219.8 billion in 2024.

Another consideration is the rise in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly as Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE) is expected to be rolled out to all users in 2024. This SGE technology will summarize and compile results from all across the internet. Research shows that total organic traffic could drop from anywhere between 18% to 65% meaning click-through rates for standard organic search results won’t be as high as they once were.

With access to so much information right at our fingertips, it’s more important than ever for your business to find new ways to stand out.

The solution for many? Perfecting experiential marketing strategies to find new, unconventional ways to engage with their customers. Today, we’re diving into the world of experiential marketing — and how you could be fully using this tactic to your advantage.

What is Experiential Marketing?

Experiential marketing (also referred to as engagement marketing) is the process of creating an experience for the customer. Traditional marketing methods are when you approach your customers through traditional or digital marketing methods, such as social media, email campaigns, print advertising, etc.

Now, while experiential campaigns are often event-centric, they do exist outside of the realm of traditional event marketing.

Engagement marketing will also pull from traditional and digital marketing in a variety of ways. For example, much like traditional efforts, experiential marketing will meet customers in their environments, but like digital marketing, it will also include a level of personalization and interaction.

One of the most well-known examples of experiential marketing or engagement marketing is Apple’s #ShotOniPhone campaign which encourages users to share their best photos on social media. This campaign went viral with its launch in 2015 and to this day the #ShotOniPhone hashtag has over 29 million tags on Instagram. You’d be hard-pressed to visit a major US city and not see a billboard or ad with an image from the campaign. This has been wildly successful because it encourages user-generated content (UGC), builds trust, builds a sense of community, and drives word-of-mouth marketing; all key aspects of an engagement marketing campaign.

Let’s Talk about the Benefits of Engagement Marketing

There are a ton of benefits to successfully deploying an experiential marketing strategy. As we just discussed, Apple has tapped into three of the key benefits, but there are more than just those three. Let’s dive into the six key benefits we find in engagement marketing.

Increase brand awareness: In a competitive market, leaving your customers with a distinct memory and experience from interacting with your brand will do wonders to build and strengthen your brand’s awareness and authority. You will drive brand awareness for the customers who experienced it, but also with their friends, family, and colleagues they share it with.

Build trust and loyalty: Providing a positive experience for your customers is an effective way to build up trust and loyalty to your business, making your customers act as brand ambassadors to their networks down the road.

Create deeper, more meaningful connections that humanize your brand: Show your customers a little sneak peek behind the scenes of the business and get real with them on a human-to-human level. Consumers want to feel appreciated by brands and feel as if they are treated like an individual. This all comes from humanizing your brand and your relationship with customers.

Demonstrate your product or service without commitment: Offer people the chance to try your product or service risk-free in a fun and new environment or interactive experience that takes all the pressure off.

Generate new leads: Much like brand awareness, interactive marketing helps you add more potential leads to every part of your sales funnel.

Differentiate yourself from your competitors: Stand out from the crowd when you host an interactive event or experience that has people continually talking about it for weeks afterward! Creating experiences like this leaves a lasting impression for years to come.

Need some inspiration for launching an effective experiential marketing strategy the right way? Stay tuned.

Experiential Marketing in Action

There are typically three elements to experiential marketing: an invitation for participation, tangible, branded offerings, and a hands-on experience. Some of these will be around in-person events, while others will be more interactive online experiences.

Here are some ideas to make sure you get this engagement marketing right from the start.

Capitalize on a Popular Trend

An effective experiential campaign doesn’t need to be something wild and crazy — think about the annual Spotify Wrapped campaigns.

Since 2015, Spotify has been delivering usage metrics to over 574 million users around the world, with a unique compilation of their top songs, artists, genres, and total minutes listened. They also made it incredibly easy for users to share these findings on their social media, sharing whose top fans they actually are and how they measure up to others in the fanbase.

Beautifully executed year after year, Spotify users eagerly await their stats to see what their year in music has looked like — and Spotify keeps retaining and expanding its customer base in part thanks to this engagement strategy.

Host an Immersive Experience or Pop-Up

Have you ever been invited to an immersive experience or branded pop-up? They’re essentially the quintessential experiential marketing strategy. Brands set these locations up temporarily to boost their sales or get the word out about a new product launch. Sometimes, these interactive experiences are all about building a vibe with the community, or they’re specifically hunting for feedback and generating some buzz around the brand.

And you know what’s cool? They’re often all planned out to attract a specific group of people, so it’s highly targeted marketing in action. It’s like they’re throwing a party but with a purpose!

→ AddEvent Pro Tip: Use an events marketing platform like AddEvent to plan, promote, and manage your experiential events in a single, digital location. That way, you can easily share your event with add to calendar buttons and links for social or email campaigns, as well as track incoming RSVPs and collect customer information so you can reach out to them about future events.

Give Out Prizes to Contest Winners

Who doesn’t love free stuff? Anytime you offer your customers something for free, they’re bound to snap those goodies right up. There’s a reason why buy-one-get-one (BOGO) sales and SWAG work so well.

Thanks to psychology, customers feel like they’re getting an item for free as opposed to paying 50% off of two products. Research shows that 66% of shoppers prefer the BOGO sale to other discount promotions, and at least 93% have taken advantage of a BOGO deal at least once in their lifetime.

Ultimately, the most important element of any experiential marketing strategy is to make sure that it is tailored to suit your audience otherwise any amount of effort will fall flat.

AddEvent can help you stand out from the crowd as you delve into the world of experiential marketing — see how we make it easy to share your events and calendars using our amazing add to calendar buttons, beautiful embeddable widgets, RSVP, and subscriber tools.