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How to increase brand engagement with experiential marketing strategies
As an experiential marketing agency, we often talk about the many advantages of pop-up shops, product sampling, and brand activations. In fact, you can find some of our deep dives on our blog. Yet, this discussion focuses less on tactics and more on the importance of taking a holistic approach to brand engagement using experiential marketing strategies.
Creating an experience to delight potential customers or excite loyal ones shouldn’t be your only game plan. Brands can use events to execute a complete brand engagement strategy and reach audiences usin multiple touchpoints to foster lasting relationships. Brands should connect experiential marketing across several channels to amplify the experience, track KPIs related to brand engagement strategies, and solicit consumer feedback. Ensuring your experiential campaign encompasses various tactics and goals can increase overall brand engagement, making the most of your experiential marketing dollars.
What is brand engagement?
Before we dive in to how brands can use experiential marketing to increase brand engagement, we want to start with the basics. Brand engagement refers to any touchpoint that creates a connection between the target audience and brands. This attachment can be emotional or rational — either of which can foster brand loyalty. Effective brand engagement — internal or external — helps establish and strengthen your company's identity.
External brand engagement represents the link you build with your audience. You might target existing customers or the prospects you encounter in promoting your products and services. After all, McKinsey associates brand engagement with greater loyalty, more connection with the brand, and greater customer value.
You might also want to try internal brand engagement. This refers to your employee interactions and the efforts you make to foster a stronger relationship with the people who work for your company. The benefits of employee engagement are well established. Gallup found that employee engagement impacts absenteeism, turnover, theft, safety, product quality, and more.
What is the goal of brand engagement?
Brand engagement is typically about increasing customer loyalty and retention, as well as encouraging consumers and/or employees to become passionate brand advocates. In either case, the best brand engagements are transformational and impact behavior.
Creating lasting customer engagement is important to your business success. Consider the following:
- A customer that is connected to your company is more likely to stay with your brand, which can reduce your reliance on costly new customer acquisition.
- Loyal customers are easier to cross- and up-sell, which can drive revenue.
- The engaged customer is more likely to speak positively about your brand, which can help with word-of-mouth marketing.
Additionally, internal brand engagements can have positive impacts as well, including:
- Greater employee retention, which reduces costly turnover and resource-intensive hiring searches.
- Engaged employees can act as brand advocates with both customers and potential employees to increase your credibility and reach.
- The engaged employee is more likely to be productive, innovative and creative, which can support your competitive advantage.
Using experiential strategies for brand engagement
Experiential marketing is all about getting the consumer or employee to experience your brand on a deeper level. With an emphasis on authenticity and interactivity, you can offer your audience a memorable experience to increase customer engagement or support internal brand engagement.
Some broad examples of experiential marketing for both internal and external brand engagement include:
- A pretzel company announcing new flavors with a guerilla marketing initiative involving contortionists (making pretzels of their bodies) accompanied by brand ambassadors offering product samples.
- Launching a new line for a fashion brand with a pop-up shop in a busy train station where customers can try on the new clothes and walking an Instagram-worthy runway to post their experiences on social media.
- Introducing a change in office technology by opening a pop-up help desk in the building lobby that’s devoted to getting people enrolled and answering their questions.
Still, whether you create immersive experiences (e.g., interactive installations or pop-up shops), leverage technology (e.g., mobile apps or virtual or augmented reality), or host workshops, classes or live performances or demonstrations, best practice is to plan other campaign elements to leverage the memorable event. Next, we’ll discuss best practices to make the most of your experiential marketing investment to continue brand engagement beyond the experiential footprint.
Take an multi-channel approach to brand engagement
Experiential marketing is immersive and in-the-moment. Yet, you don’t have to settle for surprising and delighting your customers in person — though that’s a great achievement. You can extend the return on investment from your customer engagement efforts by taking an multi-channel approach to build community.
In our work for STōK, we brought their “slow-brewed, like all of the best ideas” to life with a brand experience tour. The experience tour stops offered product samples and direct contact with brand ambassadors. But the event also encouraged continued brand engagement on social media with the addition of silly straw glasses that guests posed with for their posts.
And we didn’t stop there. We also brought the positioning to life long-term with a multi-channel campaign. Partnering with influencers, setting up retail partnerships, content marketing, and a social campaign all worked together to continue the brand engagement success. People who attended the tour were invited to share their experiences using the #SToKSummer hashtag, but even those who weren’t present could share how they uncap creativity with the cold coffee brew. The results? A nine percent increase in sales in targeted regions.
Successful brand engagement strategies are comprehensive with many touchpoints with the target audience. Let’s look at some other examples.
Shake Shack
Shake Shack used experiential marketing when they offered people in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, New York, the chance to win $2,000. Yet this was a omni-channel effort. Participants had to hunt the city neighborhoods for digital billboards advertising white truffle menu items. Then, they could scan an accompanying QR code which led them to a mobile app. Online the participant would interactively “dig” for their prize using augmented reality (AR), which aligned adeptly with the truffle theme.
Nike
Nike has become the brand it is due to its experiential marketing activities and partnerships with influencers.
Recognizing that a direct connection with customers is like “liquid gold,” the company partnered with Megan Thee Stallion to promote its Nike Training Club app. Fans could see the American rap influencer in curated outfits as she did Wellness workouts with a Nike trainer.
The campaign doubled daily activity in the mobile app and demand for her looks doubled as well.
In a strategy that could continue brand engagement long-term, the rapper also used her social media presence to encourage her fans (known as Hotties) to share their custom looks too. Plus it gave Nike access to user-generated content it could further promote on social media with its online brand communities.
WestJet
WestJet delighted passengers with a surprising customer experience during the holiday season by asking them to share their wish lists at an airport departure gate. Travelers in Toronto and Hamilton could scan their boarding passes and interact with a Virtual Santa who would greet them by name.
When guests arrived in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, they were greeted at baggage claim not only with their luggage but also with wrapped presents containing the gifts they had requested just hours earlier.
The entire gifting surprise was captured by 19 hidden cameras and the company posted its video online to later be viewed in 235 countries. Talk about brand visibility! Those views were driven by company blog posts, promoted posts on Facebook and Twitter, media coverage of the gifting, and word-of-mouth.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIEIvi2MuEk
Internally, WestJet reaffirmed its brand’s core values of being fun and caring with its internal stakeholders. Plus, it was able to repost user-generated content from WestJetters who participated in locating and wrapping the gifts or decorating the baggage claim area for the event.
Kind
Kind wanted to drive brand engagement through promoting its Almond Acres Initiative in California. The program aims to source almonds from farms using regenerative agriculture practices to reduce carbon emissions and water usage and create healthier soil, among other outcomes. But, other than inviting people to trudge around the 500 acres, how could they faciliate the experience for consumers?
Launching their customer engagement campaign shortly before Earth Day, the company integrated a website and a virtual reality experience with YouTube videos and a Snapchat filter. The brand also created content for people with Oculus Quest headsets to visit the almond farms in the California desert. Plus, they partnered with Bowser, a beekeeper with over 800,000 followers on TikTok to share sponsored content with his online community.
We love these examples of multi- and omni-channel brand engagement, as these innovative companies leveraged an experiential strategy to develop videos, content marketing, social media posts, user generated content and more.
Still, successful brand engagement also requires measuring and listening.
Measure brand engagement to iterate
Did your efforts really boost brand engagement or boost customer engagement? You’ll need to identify metrics to know.
During the campaign, you can measure brand engagement by monitoring engagement on social media platforms, participation rates, and other real-time data to understand consumer sentiment and make necessary adjustments.
After, you can analyze brand engagement and conversion data to measure success and gather insights for future strategies. Look for evidence that demonstrates how your brand engagement effort moved the needle on brand loyalty, customer loyalty, employee engagement, sales, business growth or whatever your KPIs include.
Solicit and act on customer feedback
Gathering feedback about your experiential brand engagement strategies can provide valuable insights into what has worked and why. By asking people how they feel about your customer engagement strategies, you can better understand people’s preferences and drive more brand engagement.
It’s easy enough to email surveys or solicit input from your online community. You could also try polling on your website or social media to get valuable feedback and learn how customers feel, leveraging social media engagement. Or focus groups can help you understand how your building brand engagement efforts are going.
Whichever way you go about it, don’t just ask the questions. Use the feedback to continuously improve. It’s a virtuous cycle. When you ask for customer feedback about brand engagement and act on that feedback, you are often creating more brand engagement, as your customers or employees feel heard and valued. This also helps your brand’s reputation while helping to strengthen customer relationships.
Building your customer engagement strategy
Adding experiential marketing to your brand engagement strategy can lead to exciting, innovative ideas that resonate with your customers or your employees. Thinking about how you can engage new customers and existing ones to generate more value from your experiential strategy — whether its with digital marketing such as an engaging social media content, videos, user-generated content, or something else — can lead to great brand engagement.
A Little Bird brings creativity, knowledge, and experience to our fully customized campaigns. Work with us to optimize your marketing efforts around brand engagement or to build your business’s experiential marketing strategy from the ground up.
We begin with an insightful foundation of profound community insights from strategic research, thorough data analysis and acute situational awareness. Then, we harness the potency of human bonds to create brand engagement experiences that form emotional connections.
Connect with us to create memorable campaigns that align with your marketing objectives and improve brand engagement. Contact us today!