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Roughly 29% of brands use experiential marketing to connect with consumers on a deeper level. Many of these brands rely on experiential marketing companies to make this connection, but often businesses can struggle to find the right partner to bring their campaign to life. Here are strategies to help you identify the best experiential marketing agencies for your needs.
Experiential marketing defined
Experiential marketing seeks to bring a company’s key audience closer to the brand through an experience, with a goal of forming deeper connections between the two. This marketing approach immerses audiences’ senses in all the brand offers, which ultimately helps the brand and it’s offering to resonate deeply in consumers’ minds.
Integrating digital marketing techniques, such as SEO and social media marketing, into experiential campaigns can enhance brand engagement, amplify the event beyond the initial footprint, and increase consumer impressions.
Different experiential marketing approaches include:
- Product sampling
- Sponsored events
- Partnerships with other brands
- Brand and product activations
- Guerilla marketing
- Influencer and creator content marketing
In fact, 41% of marketers say experiential events are the most effective marketing channels, even over digital advertising, content, or email marketing. That makes experiential marketing one of the most important types of marketing in your mix.
Working with an experiential marketing company can help you successfully design, develop, and execute your campaign, so choosing the right agency is important. The following can help you to find the right partner to create experiences that matter to your target audience.
Step One: Know Your Goals
Before talking to any experiential marketing agencies, align with your team on your goals. Knowing what you’re trying to accomplish with your experiential marketing campaign helps pave the way to developing a more targeted, effective strategy.
In certain cases, especially if you’ve never engaged an experiential marketing company before, they can help you come up with goals to get the most out of your campaign. They’ll do so using the background information you give them.
Typically, the discussion around aligning brand objectives with campaign goals focuses on three main elements.
Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
KPIs such as product sales, consumer data acquisition, content generation/shares, and purchase intent are typical. Still, you can define other ways of gauging brand success. Agencies should consult with you to identify metrics that matter.
Target audience
To tailor your experiential campaign, it’s important to not only know who you want to reach, but the problem your product solves for them. It’s also essential to understand where and when is optimal make a connection with your audience. Connecting with your audience might also mean incorporating tech, partnering with an influencer, or hosting events that reshape the customers view of your brand or industry.
Market awareness
Knowing what you want to achieve is one thing. You also need to explore how your competitors are speaking and marketing to consumers. You will also want to understand industry trends that could impact your brand’s success, as well as changing consumer expectations and behaviors.
In our work with energy drink brand CELSIUS, we partnered with our client to target people with an active, healthy lifestyle. So, we created an immersive brand experience at Tough Mudder competitions. We set up an obstacle course people could run at their own pace, alongside a CELSIUS tasting bar and three warm up stations designed for Instagrammable moments.
In short, you can’t know whether the experiential marketing experts you’re considering can deliver a campaign that achieves your version of success unless you can clearly communicate your goals and why they’ve brought you to experiential marketing.
Takeaway: Look for the agency that provides a proposal that best aligns its experiential marketing strategies with your brand, its audience, and your campaign goals.
Step Two: Consider Budget
You’ll likely establish a budget before discussing your experiential marketing strategy with potential partners. Think first about whether your budget aligns with your objectives. Unless you have an unlimited budget (and wouldn’t that be nice) you’ll probably have to prioritize. Choose the goals that are most important to you and consider delaying those that might not drive tangible return on investment (ROI).
By allocating your budget toward what will move the needle related to your larger goals, you are maximizing your budget and using your initial campaign to learn more about what is effecitve. Once you have those learnings, you can revisit your other objectives. In addition, proving experiential success to stakeholders may help free up the purse strings for your next effort.
Expenses specific to experiential
Depending on your familiarity level with experiential marketing, you may encounter unanticipated costs. Experiential marketing is unique and can be complex, which means it has distinct expenses such as:
- Transportation, setup, and teardown of event materials and equipment
- Product storage (e.g., when we worked with Yasso, a frozen dessert brand, we had to ensure the samples stayed frozen in summer)
- Permits for hosting events in public spaces or rental fees for event space
- Creating, building, lighting and decorating the physical space to create the desired atmosphere
- Technology such as audio-visual equipment, interactive VR/AR setups, or custom applications or software for enhancing participant interaction via digital experiences
- Salaries for brand ambassadors who interact with potential customers and represent the brand
- Branded merchandise and product samples to distribute to participants
- Insurance and security to cover potential liabilities or damages and ensure the safety of attendees and the event space.
Takeaway: With its focus on creating memorable experiences to engage customers where they live, work, and play, experiential marketing involves several costs that need to be anticipated.
Step Three: Determine the Type of Experiential Marketing Agency You Need
Now that you have done your prep work, it’s time to have an informed conversation with potential experiential partners. And you’ll have plenty of options. One way to narrow the field? Start with whether you want to use a local or national experiential agency. This section outlines the benefits of each.
Local
Local experiential companies typically operate on a city, county, or state level. A global brand looking to make inroads in single unique market might want to go local to take advantage of niche expertise.
An established local agency will generally have a deep understanding of the spaces available for event production, how to target local audiences, and what’s happening where. For instance, they can help you identify the “locals-only” activation spot that will resonate deeply with those who live in the community.
National
Your other option is a national experiential agency that activates across the country. These agencies are typically larger organizations, but sometimes you will encounter a boutique agency that excels at national execution. They might have teams based in different regions that offer the best of both local area knowledge and national scale (which is why A Little Bird has offices in L.A., N.Y., and Atlanta).
Generally, a national agency will have a more robust portfolio. In their work with a variety of clients, they get the opportunity to work in diverse industries and locations. This can help their creative and strategic experts bring an expert and perhaps new perspective to your project.
You may also find a wider breadth of services with a national agency. This can help when you want to integrate experiential with other marketing approaches. They may have team members with specialized skills and expertise.
National experiential marketing agencies can also help you scale on a national level. They’ve likely got access to resources, networks, and other value-adds that can help make the most of your campaign. Generally, they’re more likely to have experience with campaigns that cross regional boundaries and know how to maintain a consistent brand message and experience across various locations, which is crucial for maintaining brand integrity.
Takeaway: Choosing between a national and a local experiential marketing agency depends on various factors, including your goals, budget, audiences, and the scale of your campaign.
Step Four: Explore Experience and Service Offerings
You may be looking for an agency that specializes in your specific industry. Or you might be drawn to a full service agency with a diverse portfolio. Top experiential marketing agencies will have a strong track record and showcase a range of capabilities and notable client partnerships.
Portfolio
You’ll want to find a partner with experience in a variety of experiential marketing tactics. An agency that meets all brands with a suggestion of “let’s create a pop-up shop” may not be the one that provides an experience to differentiate your business.
Look for the agency’s portfolio to represent the different types of clients they work with and the quality and scale of their work. Consider the creative ways the team incorporated technology or leveraged influencer marketing, or the impact of their product sampling approach. Ask them how they have dealt with limitations or challenges in the past.
Point of View
Consider also each company’s point of view. Brands are more successful when they “know” themselves. Expect more success with an experiential marketing agency that concisely conveys its unique value proposition. After all, if they can’t tell you what makes them distinct, why trust that they can do that for your product or brand events?
A Little Bird, for example, is not a conventional marketing firm. We are “architects of communities, builders of connections, and orchestrators of relationships.” We position ourselves this way because our clients come to us because of our track record in building tangible, human connections with consumers that lead to robust, loyal brand communities. Thus our expertise as “The Community Agency.”
Services
Next, you’ll want to dive into the services that the agency provides. As you explore different agencies, keep in mind that it helps to be open-minded. Going into a consultation with an experiential marketing set on your idea of hosting a product sampling in a grocery store may inhibit the creativity and authenticity of the agency as they look to their expertise to design the best campaign for your brand.
We’d recommend partnering with an agency that seeks to understand what you envision and how that suits your goals. Then, look for them to provide a solution customized to you. This proposal should address essentials such as:
- How the experiential campaign will achieve your specific outcomes / drive measurable ROI
- How the suggested approach speaks specifically to your customer segments
- What they will do ensure brand integrity and campaign consistency
- Geographic scope and duration of the campaign
- How specific assets or resources will be allocated
- What types of experiences or activities they envision (e.g., interactive installations, product demonstrations, live performances) and their associated logistical requirements
- What technology (e.g., VR/AR, mobile apps, interactive displays) will be integrated
- How they plan to amplify and extend the reach of the experience (e.g., influencer marketing and social media integration)
- Whether there are legal or compliance issues to consider and what permits or insurance might be involved
- What post-campaign activities they plan to do to connect with customers, collect and analyze data, and measure success
- How they will communicate with you throughout the project
Takeaway: In identifying experiential company candidates, seek out an agency that can communicate what it does well and how it does it differently. Then, when consulting with potential partners, look for the agency that works to tailor their approach to your specific needs, ensuring that the campaign they propose aligns with your brand’s objectives, drives ROI, and resonates with your target audience.
Step Five: Make a Final Decision
Taking the time to determine your goals and budget helped set you up to find experiential agencies with the expertise, services, and strategic approach that best suits your needs. After consulting with several different agencies, you might have an obvious frontrunner. That makes things easier.
However, if you’re still on the fence after meeting with the different teams and getting their various pitches in writing, we’d suggest going back to the human element. Think about the people you’ve interacted with. Experiential marketing is about authentic connections; so, it makes sense to weigh your own human connection with your agency partner.
Assess the cultural fit to ensure you will share a common vision of the project and collaboration. Your experiential partner will need to be able to adapt to changes or unforeseen challenges. Plus, you want to work with people who are open to feedback and flexible enough to make adjustments as needed. If these attributes are missing, it might not matter how capable that company is—you could still have a tough time executing a successful and impactful campaign together.
Takeaway: Don’t underestimate the importance of a good cultural fit between your business and the experiential agency.
Working with A Little Bird
A Little Bird’s teams have the creativity, knowledge, and experience to design your business’s experiential marketing strategies from the ground up.
We’ll get to know you and what you stand for. We’ll gather data regarding previous campaigns, current marketing endeavors, and any other KPIs to help us create a customized campaign for your brand.
We have designed and executed activations of various scopes and sizes, including brand sponsorships, guerrilla marketing, sampling, PR events, and more. We’ll work with you to fine-tune our approach to ensure we implement an experiential marketing campaign that leaves a lasting impression on your consumers.
We’d love to get connected with you. Contact us!