While brands have more access to their audiences than ever before, it’s arguably never been more difficult to engage and convert customers. If you’re finding this to be true, it’s likely that you’re approaching your customers in the wrong manner. Instead of selling products, you might benefit from selling experiences.
What is experiential marketing?
Experiential marketing, as defined by those in the industry, is a form of advertising that focuses on helping consumers experience a brand. Instead of being sold a product or service based on features, they’re directly involved and engaged.
“While traditional advertising (radio, print, television) verbally and visually communicates the brand and product benefits, experiential marketing tries to immerse the consumers within the product by engaging as many other human senses as possible,” according to Attack! Marketing. “In this way, experiential marketing can encompass a variety of other marketing strategies from individual sampling to large-scale guerrilla marketing.”
While experiential marketing typically refers to in-store marketing techniques, live events, and other hands-on activities that directly involve customers, you don’t have to go this far to garner a return. Sometimes it’s as simple as refocusing and realigning your digital marketing efforts around a brand experience (as opposed to an isolated product).
If you can focus your content, social media, web design, and other marketing efforts around an experience, a new world of opportunities will emerge.
Tips and techniques for selling experiences
What can you learn from experiential marketing and how can you start to connect with customers on this front? Let’s take a quick look at a few tips and techniques:
1. Use the right technologies
It’s hard to sell an experience when you’re just relying on the written word. Blogging and traditional content marketing have many valuable uses and benefits, but they’re limited in how they engage the senses.
If you want to become an expert at experiential marketing, you’ll want to pay attention to virtual reality (VR) as a media platform. There’s a reason more than half of consumers say they’re more likely to buy from brands that offer VR experiences. This immersive technology gives the viewer a sense of autonomy and allows you to put customers in environments they wouldn’t otherwise experience in a typical setting.
RELATED: Virtual Reality Is Finally Here—Is Your Business Ready to Benefit From It?
2. Identify what sets you apart
Are you just like everyone else, or is there something that differentiates your brand from the competition? Typically, there’s something unique about what you do. Identify this and expound upon it.
Jimmy John’s, the popular sub shop, is an example of a company that understands what makes it different from the competition—this includes dozens of other successful brands, like Subway and Blimpie. The company’s unique selling proposition (USP) is “freaky fast” delivery. In fact, it has created an entire customer experience around the concept of speedy delivery, one that includes a blog and strategic marketing spots.
What sets your brand apart—and how can you use this USP to create powerful, experiential marketing?
3. Prioritize repetition and consistency
An experience is far less powerful if it only happens once or is directly contradicted by something else. In order to maximize your experiential marketing efforts, you must prioritize both repetition and consistency.
Want a real world example of what repetition and consistency look like in the context of experiential marketing? Look no further than Warby Parker, the eyewear boutique that sends customers five pairs of glasses to try at no cost. People don’t shop with Warby Parker because it has the world’s greatest frames, they shop with the brand because they know what sort of experience they’re going to get. The website is clean and intuitive, delivery is fast, and customer service is helpful.
Are you prioritizing repetition and consistency? Or is your messaging still fragmented? This is something you have to consider in order to stand any chance of being successful moving forward.
4. Involve customers in something bigger
When experiential marketing is successful, it’s almost always tied to something bigger and better than any one individual. Memorable experiences are consumed together and an experiential marketing campaign works best when there’s a “big picture” objective involved.
Google is the king of experiential marketing, so there’s a lot to be learned from studying what Google does. Take the company’s “Building a Better Bay Area” campaign as an example. When it came to giving $5.5 million to Bay Area nonprofits as part of its corporate philanthropy initiative, Google set up interactive posters throughout the area that allowed the public to vote and decide where the money should go. This allowed customers to feel like they were part of something much bigger than themselves.
Change your approach
Over the years, marketers have been convinced that the way you sell a product is to push blatant advertising and center marketing around the features and function of the product. It’s time to change your approach.
Today, people want to be a part of something. With the prevalence of social media, today’s customers have been conditioned to seek experiences. While there is value in selling the individual features of a product, you can’t do so independent of the big picture. And this is where your ability to create, facilitate, and sell experiences comes into play.
RELATED: Customer Experience Is Everything: Three Steps to Make Yours Unforgettable
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