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Understanding an Experiential Marketing Company: Services They Offer
It’s only a few months into 2024, and new technology has already taken the world by storm. AI tools, smarter-than-before phones, and even different social media platforms have changed the way people interact with one another. Even though we’re living in an increasingly digital world, the heart of all these advancements in technology is centered around one very important concept: human connections.
If you think about it, those connections we form with one another can be found in just about everything – especially in marketing, advertising, and consumerism. When’s the last time you purchased a product and felt like that specific brand didn’t have a care in the world about you, the consumer? Probably never, right?
Naturally, people don’t want to make a purchase if they feel unimportant or like just another statistic to a brand. The more connected they feel to the brand’s cause, history, or products, the greater the likelihood that they’ll purchase that product. Although there are many ways for businesses to connect with consumers in their target audience, one of the most successful and widely used methods is a marketing strategy called experiential marketing.
Experiential marketing focuses on forming a deeper connection between consumers and a business through immersive experiences and/or product sampling. However, as you may be able to imagine, organizing events and engaging in different product sampling campaigns is hard work.
That’s where an experiential marketing company steps in. They provide many services to business owners like you to help you forge that deeper connection with your target audience. Today, take a look at some of those services, examples of different experiential strategies, and discover what you can utilize to help your brand!
First Things First: Understanding Your Business
If you’re new to the world of experiential marketing and don’t quite know where to start, or what it can offer you, that’s okay! That’s what an experiential marketing company can help you decide. Even if you’ve thrown your own events or have experience with experiential marketing campaigns for your business, there are still plenty of strategies that an experiential marketing company can help you sort through.
Before we jump into the different types of experiential marketing services provided by companies like A Little Bird, and even before campaign development, you’ll need to help relay important information about your business to the experiential marketing company you’re working with.
Although these agencies perform their research about your brand, the information they get from your perspective and personal experiences as a business owner is unmatched.
Here’s some information you should know about your business and prepare for any experiential marketing agency you work with.
Your Target Audience
What’s one of the first things you had to think about when starting your business? Besides the “what”, you also had to decide on the “who”. By “who”, we mean none other than your target audience, of course!
After all, you’re not going to spend your precious time creating a product or getting it ready for release without knowing who the heck you’re selling to.
Knowing your target demographic is one of the most important pieces of information you should know and relay to the experiential marketing company you work with. When working with us, for example, we’ll ask you a few questions to narrow your consumer base down to a “T”.
These questions will be questions like:
- What age range is your product intended for?
- What gender(s) is your product intended for?
- Are there specific geographic locations where you sell your product?
- If applicable, what occupation, income levels, education, etc. is your product intended for?
- What groups do you not market your product towards?
Having all this information at the ready will help both you and us streamline the experiential marketing process and get the show on the road.
Long and Short-Term Goals
You should also come equipped with your long and short-term goals. This helps us nail down the direction of the marketing campaigns we create with you.
Do you have specific KPIs you want to work towards? Maybe you want to play around a little bit, dip your toes in the water, or experiment with the different experiential marketing campaigns we have to offer.
Whatever the case may be, helping us understand your business goals can help us create more succinct, successful, and targeted experiential marketing campaigns. There’s nothing worse than wasted time and money, especially in the business world.
Your Brand’s History
This might seem like a silly point we’re trying to make. You may be thinking, “Who cares about my brand’s history? We’re marketing in the present, and I’m not worried about the past as much”. Those are valid concerns, and we see you.
However, injecting “you” and your brand into any marketing campaign helps you not only relate to your consumers more but get the word out there about who you are. Did you start from scratch and expand to numerous brick-and-mortar stores? Let’s brag about that! Maybe you reached a certain number of people over X amount of years.
What we’re trying to say is, don’t be afraid to show people who you are and what you’ve accomplished. A big part of a consumer’s decision-making process is being able to trust brands and put a face to the brand’s name. While you may not physically have to show your face, it helps to give them statistics and important pieces of your brand’s history that make them remember you.
Brand Values and Identity
This point relates closely to the previous point, in that you’re going to need to convey your brand values and identity to the marketing company you work with. Do you have any slogans or taglines that help represent your brand? What are the key values and promises that you maintain?
Experiential marketing agencies love utilizing these key elements to craft campaigns that represent you in the best way possible. It also helps us get to know you a little better and relate to you, too.
Your Budget
Ah, the dreaded budget discussion. It had to come up at some point, and no better way to address budgeting with a marketing company than coming prepared ahead of time. We know this isn’t your favorite part of marketing, so we’ll keep things short and sweet for you.
Come to any creative agencies you're discovering with a rough budget in mind. This helps the company understand what services they can help you with. You could also contact the company ahead of signing on with them and ask about their pricing models, to see if you can come to your initial meeting ready to talk pricing.
Information About Your Competition
Nothing keeps pressure on a business like the business’s competition. Each business has some sort of competition. It’s part of life! Coming equipped to your meeting with an experiential agency with even the bare minimum about your competition is better than knowing nothing at all.
Experiential marketing agencies leverage the information and research you give them about your competition to conjure up creative, out-of-the-box campaigns that are irresistible to consumers.
Experiential Marketing Campaign Development
After you’ve gotten past introductions and feel like your dedicated experiential marketing agency has a good grasp on your brand, they can start helping you develop your experiential marketing campaigns.
Always keep in mind that not all campaigns are made equal. Even if you decide to run multiple experiential campaigns at once, they’re going to look different and likely run for varying amounts of time. You’ll probably even collect different types of data from each campaign.
At the end of the day, keeping an open mind during the campaign development process is one of the most important things you can do.
How A Little Bird Develops Campaigns
During the design process for experiential marketing campaigns, we take into account all the information we learn about your brand. Next, people on your team and our team work closely together to select different types of campaigns that we know will yield the best results.
We work out the nitty-gritty details and set the plan in action. However, the work isn’t done even after the campaign finishes. We also help you analyze the data yielded from those campaigns so you can plan for the future and be even more successful. You’ll be able to read more about that in-depth, later.
Example One: Product Activations & Brand Activations
There are a lot of strategies involved in experiential marketing. One such strategy is product activation. Another similar, yet different strategy is brand activation. Many experiential marketing agencies help with brands’ product activations or brand activations as part of their services.
Let’s take a look at what these strategies are, and what that might entail if you choose to include this with your experiential marketing strategy.
What Is Product Activation & Brand Activation?
Product activation refers to a campaign or any set of steps that a company takes to propel a specific product into the spotlight. In short, it is a way to get a specific product into as many consumer’s heads and/or hands as possible. This can take the form of a product launch or be utilized for existing products.
Brand activations are similar, yet unique experiences where brands seek to increase their outreach to their target audience and make themselves known as an established brand. They seek to leave a lasting impact on people, so they remember the brand.
In this digital era, many people have turned from shopping in person to completing their purchases online. It’s because of this that makes it harder for people to relate to products and interact with them, thus making it more difficult for companies to persuade consumers to purchase from them.
However, there’s nothing to worry about when you’ve got the best experiential marketing company at your fingertips! Let us help you with your specific product activation projects, so everyone you want to know knows about them.
How It’s Done
This is a little bit of a trick question. There’s no singular, correct way to launch a product activation campaign! Product activation campaigns are unique to a business and its products, values, target audience, and more.
Furthermore, what works for you might not necessarily work for a competitor of yours. Your brand itself might even use different product activation strategies to launch that product into the hands of the people.
Example Two: Sponsorships & Partnering At Large Events
A big part of experiential marketing, especially the strategies we use at A Little Bird, is made up of sponsorships and partnerships brands have at large events. This can also be called event marketing, although event marketing can be more than just sponsorships at events.
It might not be what you think of if you imagine experiential marketing in a nutshell. However, it’s more prevalent than ever before!
What Do Partnerships or Sponsorships Look Like At Events?
A partnership or sponsorship at an event takes place when brands offer to fund an event (in part or in full) in exchange for something in return. What’s this “something”, you ask? Typically, it’s more brand exposure or opportunities to interact with the audience of the event.
Even though these interactions might not last longer than a few seconds, a few seconds is all a brand needs to plant a seed of thought in an attendee’s mind.
Have you ever been to a large event such as a race, a state fair, a concert, or anything else that’s had groups of people belonging to one brand going around handing out samples or talking to people about that specific brand? This could be a result of said brand sponsoring or partnering with that event!
Another example of when you’d know specific sponsorships at these events would be when you look through informational pamphlets and see a “Sponsorships and Partners” section, by identifying brand logos on pieces of clothing attendees, employees, or volunteers have.
Why They’re So Successful
Why are sponsorships and partnerships so successful? That’s a great question! To answer this, you first need to understand the goal of sponsorships. As we hinted at earlier, when brands sponsor different things (events, influencers, videos, etc.), they’re after that increased outreach and positive brand reputation.
Sponsorships, therefore, are so successful because hundreds or even thousands of people can, in some way, interact with that brand and receive remarkable brand experiences. At the very least, they see the brand’s name plastered nearly everywhere.
The more you see something, the more you’re going to remember it. The same concept is applied to this marketing tactic!
Example Three: Product Sampling Events
Have you ever gone shopping in a larger store, such as Costco, and seen little pop-up stands with samples of food and drink items or even things such as cosmetics? This nifty little marketing strategy is also known as product sampling and is just one method underneath the experiential marketing umbrella that helps draw consumers closer to your brand.
Although not beneficial for every brand, it’s something that most experiential marketing companies offer as part of their services. Let’s take a closer look at the finer details of product sampling.
Product Sampling Events Defined
A product sampling event is any event put on by a brand that allows them to showcase their products (typically a few specific products) to consumers and let them interact with the products. There are many ways that this interaction is fostered, whether that be through taste, feeling the product, smelling the product, looking at the product, or even hearing the product.
Most often, brands put on these events in a way that lets consumers use multiple senses, i.e. taste, smell, and sight or hearing and sight. Sometimes, specific products can enlist the use of all five senses, which only adds to consumer engagement!
What Types of Businesses Benefit From Product Sampling
Not all companies benefit from or can utilize product sampling events to their advantage. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of companies that may benefit from this type of experiential marketing:
- Food and drink businesses
- Clothing businesses
- Perfume and cologne businesses
- Cooking and kitchen businesses
- Companies that sell everyday products
- So much more
Example Four: Guerilla Marketing Campaigns
Experiential marketing is all about trying to form those deeper connections between you and your target audience. To do that, you have to get a bit creative with the way you present your brand and its products to consumers.
One of the most creative, albeit unconventional, ways that experiential marketing companies help your brand stand out is through guerilla marketing campaigns. It might sound scary, but when executed properly, it can work wonders for publicity.
What’s Guerilla Marketing?
In short, guerilla marketing is a marketing strategy that operates quickly and at in-person events to increase the exposure of a brand’s products. The main component? An element of surprise - which we’ll dive into more in the next section.
Traits to Keep Front and Center In Guerilla Marketing Campaigns
Guerilla marketing is a very distinct form of experiential marketing, thus having its own set of unique traits. Here are some of those traits that any good experiential marketing agency keeps in mind while it creates guerilla campaigns for your brand.
Ambush Tactics
When you think of an ambush, you probably think of a surprise attack, or something unexpected happening in an all-of-a-sudden manner. That’s the same idea guerilla marketing employs. People representing a brand go around to event attendees and surprise them with a fun fact, sample, or other information about a brand.
Low Costs
Another distinct trait of guerilla marketing campaigns is that they don’t cost nearly as much money as other types of marketing events do. At most, the cost of a guerilla campaign is any advertising prices or entry prices that events require.
There aren’t any ongoing costs or big project costs associated with guerilla marketing. If you’re paying an exorbitant amount of money for guerilla marketing, you’re doing it wrong.
Immediate Emotional Connection
When you utilize guerilla marketing, you’re taking advantage of an immediate emotional connection formed with people. If you think about it, it makes sense. If someone walked up to you and randomly started talking to you, offering you free samples, or discounts of some sort, you’d stop in your tracks, right?
Well, you’re not alone. Most people do just that – out of shock, too. They stop in their tracks and will listen to what you have to say. It’s human nature!
Unconventionalism & Creativity
Guerilla marketing allows you to get creative and unconventional. How you get peoples’ attention, the information you tell them, and how you engage them with your products is ultimately up to you.
The world of guerilla marketing is your oyster, and yours to play around with. Although we don’t recommend literally playing around with an oyster. That’s kind of icky.
Social Media and Other Digital Marketing Integration
When you start marketing for your business, there’s a low likelihood that you only pursue one type of marketing at a time. In many cases, different marketing strategies overlap and mesh very well together, priming businesses for success (when implemented properly, of course).
One excellent example of this is combining experiential marketing techniques with social media and other digital marketing strategies. This is why many experiential marketing agencies not only provide top-notch experiential marketing services, but integration with your other streams of marketing as well.
At A Little Bird, we don’t believe in providing the bare minimum to you. We work with you to build fully customized experiential marketing strategies. If you’ve got existing marketing campaigns such as social media, influencer campaigns, or other content you publish, we can seamlessly integrate that with these new experiential marketing efforts.
That way, you can stay consistent with your other forms of marketing and add another level of interconnectedness with your consumers. After all, we don’t call ourselves master planners for nothing!
Analyzing Data and Planning for the Future
It’s very exciting to discuss new experiential marketing strategies, implement different events and tactics, and discover new ways to interact with your target audience. Being face-to-face with consumers not only provides a higher value to them but provides you with valuable feedback as well.
However, the last thing you want to do is finish an experiential marketing plan and blindly move on to the next plan. Planning, planning, and more planning is the name of the game when it comes to experiential marketing. Part of that planning is, of course, understanding that data.
But what kinds of results do you get from experiential marketing campaigns, you ask? Well, that’s sort of a trick question. The type of data and feedback you get from your experiential marketing campaigns is really up to you to decide. It can be really hard to come up with KPIs and intertwine them with your marketing goals and experiential strategies all on your own.
That’s why many experiential marketing agencies include campaign data analysis as part of the services they offer. They build your marketing campaigns with you, and help you decide what kinds of data you should aim to collect with the campaigns. They can help integrate your goals, competitors, and any KPIs in campaigns so it’s easier to get these measurable results.
After you conclude a campaign, it’s a good idea to sit down with your experiential marketing agency and talk through the results. You’ll be able to figure out what those results mean, and how you can plan for the future in terms of more marketing campaigns and business growth.
Talk to A Little Bird
At the end of the day, what you need for your business is an experiential marketing agency that you can rely on. An agency that can provide you with premium support, planning, innovation, expertise, and data collection that helps lead you to growth and success. Look no further than here!
A Little Bird isn’t just another experiential marketing agency. We provide classic experiential marketing strategies, such as campaign development, important research, and community building. We can even assist you with numerous types of experiential marketing strategies, such as sampling campaigns, trade shows, and mobile tours.
Outside of our top-of-the-line experiential marketing services, we offer many services that perfectly complement experiential marketing. Do you need social campaigns? We’ve got you covered. Do you need help with consumer segmentation and the consumer journey? We can do that too.
Our experts are the best in the business at combining both creative methodologies and data-driven tactics, so you’re guaranteed to get the best of the best when working with us.
Maybe you don’t quite know where to start or what services you need help with. Well, that’s okay too! Let’s get connected and map out your business’s journey to success.
We aren’t just limited to the different strategies we talked about here, and would love to hear your ideas and suggestions! Give us a call or email us today. Let’s talk strategy.