No matter what your niche is, every blog, business, and website is constantly searching for new ways to stand out from the crowd. Often, this means establishing a brand that can fuel a connection between you, and your customers. Of course, building that brand successfully is easier said, than done.
Experiential marketing – known in some circles as experience marketing – involves creating a campaign that engages consumers.
The goal of most experiential campaigns is to forge an emotional bond between the brand and the consumer, so most well-planned solutions enhance brand profiles, create product awareness, and effectively communicate the identity and voice of the brand.
When most people think about experiential marketing, they tend to think in terms of real-life events. And that’s understandable, because experiential marketing typically involves some kind of human interaction with a product or theme.
But there’s much you can do online before you event contemplate launching a campaign.
1. Establish Credibility with SEO
Before your experiential campaign can begin, your aim should be to establish yourself as a reliable niche authority. In other words, when people see your brand, they should associate it with relevance, and value.
The best way to make this happen is with high-quality content that utilises techniques for SEO optimisation, such as keyword placement, and the careful administration of meta descriptions.
A meta description is the part of your SEO strategy that intelligently employs the keywords you use throughout your content, as well as your brand’s unique voice, to create something visitors want to click on.
Remember, with SEO and meta descriptions alike, uniqueness, and direct relevance to each page is essential. Careful SEO planning should ensure that when your experiential marketing goes live, your reputation precedes you.
2. Tell a story online
One of the main reasons why experiential marketing is a successful option for many people, is that it leaves the customer with a story to tell his or her friends, relatives, and co-workers.
Storytelling defines a powerful part of marketing that can instantly forge an emotional bond between brands and customers. Just as you should aim to tell an engaging story with your content and marketing efforts, your experiential marketing should encourage others to tell stories about you.
Although storytelling is an applicable process for online and offline methods alike, it works best in a digital medium, wherein customers are unable to physically see and communicate with a living, breathing representative of a brand.
When interacting with a person, customers are more likely to form an emotional connection, which is why cultivating emotion through storytelling is so crucial to a digital medium – where brands are more separated from their market.
3. Integrate social media and pay attention to feedback
Incorporating social media into the foundations of all your online experiential marketing efforts could help to make or break your campaign.
After all, while the above tip underscores the importance of storytelling in today’s digital marketing age, social media is the platform through which you can encourage fans to share their experiences with your brand, as well as advocate for your business.
The more you incorporate social media, the more your marketing campaign will be amplified to reach thousands of online viewers.
Social media has even become an important part of SEO ranking today, making it a great option to consider from the start of building your brand.
Just make sure that you pay attention to the conversation you generate, and respond to the reactions given by consumers. By looking at feedback and responding accordingly, you can adjust and refine your message in real time to appeal more strongly to your target market.
