Build an Experiential Marketing Campaign in 7 Steps

As you’ve probably guessed, building an effective experiential marketing campaign requires a lot of preliminary research and planning. If you want to take a stab at this marketing technique, keep these seven steps in mind as you consider, design, and implement your brand’s event. The Red Bull Music platform is a great example of authentic marketing campaigning over the long term that has proven results to their customer base and to their target artist communities.

1. Gather feedback on your current customer experience.

Experiential marketing is absolutely consumer-centric. After all, your goal is to tailor an experience exactly to your consumers’ tastes: It has to draw them in, engage their senses, and leave an impact strong enough to make them want to come back for more. 

So, before you dive into an experiential marketing strategy, you need to understand how your customers currently interact with your products, and how they emotionally connect with your brand. Then, you can figure out an experiential strategy that aligns with, and leverages, the messages or offerings that most appeal to your customers.

For many businesses, both big and small, that feedback platform is primarily digitally-driven. In particular, social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, plus feedback forums on your small business website, all facilitate direct interaction between you and your customer. These digital platforms are fast, simple, and mostly-free ways to gather intel on how customers experience your brand. That way, you’ll make sure you deeply understand your customers’ behaviors before launching into an experiential marketing campaign.

2. Define and hone your brand experience.

A successful experiential marketing campaign means deeply understanding your brand, your target audience, and how your product serves that audience in a tangible way—or, why your product is an indispensable part of your customers’ lives. 

So, once you’ve gathered data on your consumer base, you’ll need to answer, some key questions that further define your brand’s core values. Start with questions like:

• Who are you, and what do you stand for? 
• How does your product or service make your customers’ lives better? 
• What do you offer your customers that your competitors don’t? 

An experiential marketing campaign translates those core values into an interactive experience. Here’s the ultimate goal for a successful experiential marketing tactic: Your brand is so well-defined, and your interactive experience is so aligned with that message, that your customers will be able to answer all those questions themselves when they take part in your campaign. Then, they’ll be so excited by that message that they’re inspired to become loyal customers.

3. Design your brand experience.

We get it: “Designing your brand experience” can seem like a big, overwhelming task. How, exactly, can you engage your customers in new and innovative ways, all while conveying your brand’s core message?

In this case, let emotion be your lodestar. Use all that customer feedback you’ve garnered to discern how your customers feel when they use your product or service. Do they feel comforted? Energized? Cared for? Inspired? Design an interactive experience that envelopes your customer in that core emotion.

Another way to zero in on what makes your company unique is to identify how your product or service fixes a problem in your customers’ lives. Then, your experiential campaign can deliver the solution to right to them. 

In that PSFK roundtable discussion, Monica Brouwer, an Experiential Marketing Director, explains how she designs brand experiences for Casper mattresses. Brouwer’s method is to “understand the pain points” their customers face in a certain environment. 

Then, their most successful experiential campaigns “create … rescue moments where we come into a space … and provide temporary relief, whether it’s a nap or to recharge your phone or finding a hotel room last minute.” In fact, Casper provided all of the above in a hugely successful experiential marketing campaign at SXSW festival in 2017.

4. Create a detailed campaign plan.

Experiential campaigns require organizing a lot of moving parts, so write a step-by-step plan for how you’ll implement your campaign. And, as you plan, start to expect the unexpected: As with any human-driven event, it’s unlikely that an interactive campaign will go exactly according to plan. So consider a few worst-case scenarios, and create contingency plans around them.    

5. Consider a partnership

Casper has conducted some of its most successful experiential campaigns by partnering with large companies or brands, including SXSW, The Standard Hotel in New York City, and Target. “When we’re coming in and identifying brand partners, we try to carve out our own space by being adjacent to the activity, not directly involved,” Brouwer said. 

Small businesses can follow Casper’s lead here. If your company offers a niche product or service, partner up with a larger company whose values overlap—even a little bit—with your own. By partnering with a bigger company or event, like a festival, you’ll share the costs of the campaign, use the physical space in which they’re executing their own marketing campaign, and, ideally, draw in a whole new segment of customers to whom you may not have had access before.         

6. Design a share-worthy campaign.

Okay, we have to expound upon the importance of social media one more time. 

Just to reiterate, experiential marketing campaigns aren’t only about selling products—they’re really intended to promote a brand’s message and reputation. 

In some campaigns, in fact, a brand’s products aren’t for sale in the campaign’s space at all. Take a closer look, for instance, at Lean Cuisine’s #WeighThis campaign, which took place in New York City’s Grand Central Station. Participants in the campaign didn’t actually buy any frozen meals at Grand Central—instead, this campaign established a 428% increase in mentions on social media and, as a part of a holistic brand redesign, led to the company’s increased sales. 

So, don’t underestimate the role of social media in contributing to your experiential campaign’s success. Even if you only host fifteen people at your bakery’s bread-making lesson, all of those fifteen people may post on their social media channels, and tell (hopefully) everyone they know, about their positive experiences. In other words, all the customers you reach through your experiential marketing campaigns can become your brand ambassadors, who’ll do a lot of the selling for you. 

Plus, the content you and your participants generate can far outlast a campaign that lasts only a few months, weeks, or hours. So when you design your experiential campaign, think about its “shareability” factor, and how those images and tweets will convey your brand’s message to an untapped audience. 

7. Stay on budget.

We know what you’re thinking: As a small business owner, it’s unlikely that you have the budget required to erect a beer-dispensing billboard outside your office.

But it is possible to create Instagram-worthy experiences for your potential customers without a Carlsberg-sized budget. Consider experiential marketing initiatives that leverage your existing resources.

For instance, if you own a brewery, you can host a tour of your facilities and provide a tasting session at the end. You can even partner up with a nearby restaurant and do a beer-and-food pairing. 

If you own a pet grooming company, take a cue from NYC’s Tompkins Square Park and host a dog parade in your local park, then award your merchandise as prizes to the best-dressed dogs.

Or, take a page from Lululemon’s book and offer a free demo of your services—whether that’s yoga-teaching, teeth-cleaning, or business accounting—at your local job fair. 

Again, experiential marketing provides potential customers the opportunity to interact with your brand face-to-face—and that doesn’t always require splurging. 

→TL;DR: Experiential marketing campaigns require deeply understanding your customer’s behaviors and desires, fine-tuning your brand’s identity, and delivering a memorable experience that ties the two together.