Welcome to the digital age of marketing, where online noise does more to confuse than help. We bet you’ve seen it yourself: ad prices are high, and there’s no guarantee that your target audience will notice you in the flood of competitors. 

That’s where experiential marketing comes in. This event marketing strategy uses a blend of market research and immersion to bring brands to life in a way that connects on an emotional level with potential customers.

That’s why we believe an investment in experiential marketing events is an investment in your brand and all your loyal consumers.

We’re not just saying this because we’re an experiential marketing platform; we have the data to back it up.

In fact, 9 out of 10 marketers believe that experiential marketing is important to their strategy. 

Why is that? And how do other experiential marketing campaigns make it an integral part of their strategy?

Sit tight, and we’ll unravel the whys, whats, and who-dunnits of experiential marketing.

What is Experiential Marketing?

Experiential marketing, also known as engagement marketing or event marketing, are immersive events or brand homes that bring a brand’s values to life. This can include both physical and online events, although today a good interactive, in-person experience does wonders. 

In fact, a good experiential marketing campaign can:

• Increase brand awareness
• Drive positive brand perception
• Improve marketing strategies across your brand

This dynamic relationship between brand and consumer is more emotionally driven than traditional marketing. Human beings crave connection, and an interactive experience creates a memory and bond that can’t be found online.

How Does Experiential Marketing Work?

To double down on the emotional connection piece, The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology noted in their research titled "Spending on Doing Promotes More Moment-to-Moment Happiness than Spending on Having.” It’s a real mouthful but the premise is fairly simple. 

Across their research subjects, experiences created more satisfaction even though people typically spend more time using their material possessions. Experiential marketing endures in people’s memories while the perceived value of material goods weakens over time.

Experiential marketing campaigns use that premise to make its mark. 

So, when you create an experience that brings your brand and its values to life, you create a bond with your consumers that endures. When your consumers see your brand in the store, they’re more likely to remember your immersive marketing and reach for your product. 

Expands Brand Awareness

Consumer brands are always trying to stay top of mind, and experiential marketing is a great way to get the word out and introduce your products to new consumers. 

Alcohol and CPG brands especially can take advantage of event marketing to introduce a new product or even just encourage sampling while educating consumers on the different cocktails or sandwiches your product can be used in.

In fact, we found that 70% of consumer event marketers use experiential marketing specifically to increase brand awareness and loyalty.

The breakdown of brand event marketing specifically speaks to this goal.

We’re looking at popular, big events with a lot of eye and foot traffic, a big metric for consumer event success. 

For example, if you want to get people more familiar with your product or more aware, doing a product tasting where your consumers are, like festivals, conventions, or even malls and grocery stores, can convert first-timers to long-timers. This is a great tactic for alcohol, beverage, and food brands like JUST Egg, which use their product sampling to create new consumers and experiences to cement them in their minds.

Inspires Loyalty in Experiential and Beyond

In our State of Experiential Marketing 2024 report, we found that overwhelmingly, marketers use experiential to improve brand loyalty. 

Consumer brands especially try to nurture brand loyalty since it boosts their average transaction value and keeps the LTV thriving. Personalization marketing strategy is the name of the game here. After all, a good experiential marketing strategy depends on memorable experiences that hit harder than digital ads ever could.

But the benefits of experiential marketing don’t stop at pop up shops. It affects brand loyalty across the board when the data from the experience itself is shared cross-functionally. 

When demographic, purchase, and personalization info is shared with loyalty teams, brand teams, and beyond, you're arming your larger team to build your customer relationships.

How a brand connects depends on how well they know their target audience, and when you fill in the blanks for other teams, it unblocks their marketing efforts to drive loyalty across the board.

Encourages Consumers to Invest Their Time

Did you know that 63% of consumers view brands as the biggest benefactors of data exchange? That’s not a great indicator for any consumer brand looking to increase their database.

Even worse, 57% of US consumers would rather do without marketing personalization and protect their data. If personalization is so important like we talked about above, then how do you prove to consumers that you want them to benefit too?

We at AnyRoad talk a lot about value exchanges, where two things of equal perceived worth are traded. You see where we’re going with this, right? 

Experiential marketing is one of the best value exchanges you can offer. In-person events make consumers feel they’re getting something out of it and, in fact, are more likely to offer their email addresses, names, and even zip codes with the right tailoring. 

Now imagine not just how it can help your engagement marketing but also your entire brand’s strategy. When you know who’s interested in developing a deeper relationship with your brand and where they’re located, you can reduce the guesswork for where you market next or even distribute across the board.

When consumers share their personal details, they invite you into their lives. They want you to know who they are because they want to build a relationship and experience more with you. 

Consumer Experiential Marketing Examples

It’s tough for all industry professionals, not just the consumer brand pillar. There’s so much data about experiential marketing that it’s now hard to tell what worked for a brand and what didn’t. It’s not like they publish their results. 

So we dug in for you. Experiential marketing examples are aplenty, but here are marketing efforts that work and why.

Event Marketing Example - Conversate Collective

Conversate Collective, an experiential events agency, was eager to create purchasing behavior profiles to drive revenue for their CPG beauty client. 

The best way to build that database? A series of large-scale experiential marketing events. 

Conversate aimed to engage large segments of the beauty brand’s consumer base and learn more about them. They were eager to understand consumer behavior, like where they live, shop, and how often they use the brand’s beauty products.

Conversate began developing a series of four large-scale pop-ups at key locations. They used flexible data capture, like contactless QR codes and mobile registration, to make it easy for the brand to gather consumer data. They learned which distribution channels to double down on and which to ease up with. 

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Brand Home Example - Ben & Jerry’s Factory Tours

For more than 40 years, Ben & Jerry’s has been a beloved brand and a global phenomenon. In fact, the company’s ice cream is so popular that millions of fans have made the trek to Waterbury, Vermont for a guided tour of the company’s original factory, along with a gift shop and scoop shop, known as Ben & Jerry’s Factory Experiences. 

Buying tickets hasn’t always been easy despite sold-out factory tours, mostly because they couldn’t be purchased online. “The only option was to show up the day of to purchase tickets onsite for the next available tour, which at peak times might be a two-hour wait,” recalls Samantha Lacasse, the factory's general manager.

They used an experiential marketing platform to help them  collect valuable first-party data to understand better who attends the tours and what impact they have on the brand. Guests who bought tickets online are asked to complete a pre-and post-experience survey. These questions capture demographic information and feedback about their experience.

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The Takeaway 

Events are vital for a well-rounded consumer strategy; they positively impact each stage of the consumer journey, from initial brand awareness to loyalty. The unique personalization of experiential makes collecting consumer information, building profiles, and developing deeper relationships with attendees easier than ever before. 

Cutting through the digital noise is vital in 2024 and will continue into the future. Knowing how consumers think about you and how you can use the information to scale your brand’s growth isn’t just important; it’s critical for a brand’s survival.