Customer location doesn’t, at first glance, seem to be a burning issue when it comes to marketing. After all…we, as campaign co-ordinators and creators, dictate where we put our focus and advertising. They come to us right?
Well, not if you’re in experiential marketing, no.
And that is, we believe, what makes experiential campaigns potentially a great deal more effective than traditional marketing methods.
Why? We’re glad you asked…
Customer location, in the first instance, can dictate your whole campaign strategy. We know that’s something of a bold statement, but we believe it’s the case.
Take the two differing styles of your average marketing campaign.
Traditional media methods will advocate the selecting of your target market and then, in all likelihood, the buying in of advertising across print, television and latterly internet media. Job done. There may also be promotional work featuring prize campaigns or, in rare cases, some kind of roadshow/event based around either the capital city or a selection of major cities. And that, by and large, is essentially it.
Of course, there are bound to be exceptions – we don’t deny that. The last few years have regularly featured campaigns attempting to capture the zeitgeist for instance…though this has fallen flat more than once – but as a model this is fairly typical.
Now let’s look at a similar experiential campaign.
An initial step with an experiential campaign is to pick your target areas. This can be done with the aid of any relevant data you may have. More than that, a good experiential agency will make sure the market research is done themselves through the use of initial footfall based operations.
Once your target market is decided upon the experiential company involved will work out where the greatest concentrations of your potential consumers are. They will then use these results as the basis for campaign targeting.
Advance teams will move into the relevant areas and select those which best suit the needs of your intended campaign. That being said, experiential campaigning has such a flexible and fluid nature that it’s eminently possible to adapt your campaign to best suit the areas selected to provide greater impact. Matters such as geography, accessibility and population density will all be taken into consideration and assessed in the run up to any activity.
Once a plan has been decided on and the campaign details finalised (which is another article in and of itself!) the whole operation will swing into action.
This, however, is not the end of it. Not by a long chalk. Throughout the chosen activity further research will be going at ground level. This research will be collected and correlated at the end of the activity and used to assess the success of the operation.
This, in turn, will be used to indicate where the campaign should be going from this point, whether or not the correct markets are being reached and whether or not the campaign itself is being seen as a success.
From this point the client can decide what to do…as they can at the end of a normal marketing campaign. The difference here is that an experiential campaign tends to give figures and research statistics that are vastly more in-depth and relevant than comparable traditional campaigns. It’s also very likely that the experiential campaign will come in at a lower cost than traditional marketing, but once again, this is not an absolute rule – and not necessarily even relevant, we just like to point this kind of thing out.
Another, equally important, aspect of the targeting that experiential campaigns excel at is that a high percentage of the target market will be reached during the campaign – as a direct result of the investigation into customer location. Traditional campaigns cannot promise this. In fact, traditional marketing media campaigns are often rather vague on why they are reaching. Such is the nature of print and television.
This then is why customer location is vitally important to the success of your campaign – simply put it drives the entire workings of the operation. Once you have identified your market and its location every single aspect of your campaign after that point can be geared towards them and not some vague general idea of where they may be.
All the statistics and information you require can be gathered directly from source as opposed to market research companies who may, or may not, be getting accurate representative samples.
And from this base with this knowledge your brand stands a vastly improved chance of being successful.