Experiential marketing pulls the emotional cords of consumers and thus helps increase awareness of and loyalty towards your brand. It also helps marketers save tremendously on their marketing costs, as costly promotional schemes and other marketing gimmicks to target and lure the consumer are no longer needed. The best part is that experiential marketing brings the marketer face-to-face with the consumer.
Marketers carry out experiential marketing activities through exhibitions, free product samples, in-store activities, road shows, and in many other ways.
Today, the strength of a product or service alone does not sustain it for long. New products are constantly introduced into the market with better features, making it difficult for marketers to win customer loyalty. This leads to a rise in advertising spending by each player in an attempt to win customers, creating a lot of noise in the market. Experiential marketing helps customers relate to and distinguish a product from others available on the market by experiencing it first-hand. For marketers, this type of marketing helps in creating brand awareness and makes the brand stand out from the competition.
Advantages of Experiential Marketing
- Experiential marketing reduces the cost of launching a new product. Putting the product right in front of your customers or prospective customers to experience it does away with the need to spend on advertising and promotional activities that are meant to achieve the same objective.
- In a highly crowded market where product features of different players are more or less similar, experiencing the product can help marketers differentiate it from the rest. A product that gives a good experience will be remembered by customers for a long time.
- Experiential marketing provides a great learning ground for marketers as it allows one-on-one interaction with customers. This gives accurate information on their expectations and level of satisfaction derived from the product.
- If marketers are able to win customer goodwill through experiential marketing, they can be sure of positive word of mouth advertising and an increase in the number of customers.
- Location of experiential marketing is important to give the right experience to customers.
- Experiential marketing will help marketers only when they have a valid distinction to show to their customers in terms of comparison of product features or advantages over competitors.
- Targeting the right audience is important to gain maximum mileage from an experiential marketing activity.
- Experiential marketing is most effective when there is one-on-one interaction between the marketer and the customer. Activities enabling personal interaction with the customer will thus be more effective.
Winning customers is important for marketers, but retaining them is more important. Experiential marketing allows marketers to give a wholesome experience to their customers instantly. A positive experience of a product or service through experiential marketing can help marketers capitalize on the long-term advantages of customer loyalty and goodwill.
