Every brand wants to win the trust of its customers as it’s the basis of long-term advocacy. However, consumers are growing skeptical about brands and their marketing tactics. As a result, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to generate trust.
Many traditional marketing tactics involve pushing sales-led messaging on to consumers, whether through TV commercials, print advertisements, social media or telemarketing. These marketing tactics are now commonplace, and consumers remain apprehensive about such ploys.
Experiential marketing is different. Experiential provides an opportunity to demonstrate your brand’s products or services in a more meaningful way by engaging with prospects and consumers on an emotional level by creating positive memories through experiences that can be shared among peers and communities online.
With word-of-mouth being the most trusted form of marketing, experiential marketing can take your brand to the next level and help build consumer confidence in your brand. Brands wanting to connect with their customers on an emotional level to win their trust and generate advocacy, must place value on creating positive experiences.
Building Trust Through Experiential
Simply demonstrating a product or service won’t create a connection or have a meaningful impact on consumers. There are a few things to consider if you want to build trust and drive advocacy.:
1. Immerse your customers
Customers having positive experiences is great, but these experiences must be relevant to your brand or product in order to attract the right audiences. Experiences must immerse customers in your brand and provide a story to explore, personalise and share.
2. Capture user content
Experiential marketing gets people talking about your brand. Some participants will want to capture their memories and share them online. Consider how you can capture this content such as branded hashtags.
3. Promote your activities
Promote your event online to amplify the experience before, during and after the event. Consider inviting press and influencers to your experimental activities to help spread the word on your brand. Sharing the event online is also a great way to involve people who could not attend.
4. Attain customer data
Once the event is over, you will want to continue the event. By cleverly attaining customer data such as emails through event marketing software you can continue the event with participants and remain top of mind post event.
5. Measure the success
Experiential marketing has many benefits that can’t be ignored. However, for your event to be labelled a success, you must be set out a list of measurable goals. Whether that’s taking count of attendance, sales, media coverage or/and online mentions.
The brands that are encouraging participation, creativity and collaboration of consumers through experiential marketing are the brands winning. Experiential marketing helps establish stronger relationships between brand and consumer through positive interaction. And with word-of-mouth being the most trusted source of information, positive interactions can be beneficial to your brand presence and sales.