In a dynamic and often unpredictable environment your experiential marketing activity will fail if some common best practice standards are not followed. MD Sally Durcan shares some insights into Hotcow’s bespoke planning model.
Strategic planning for a live experiential marketing event is no mean feat. The result of having a strong strategy coupled with thorough research, mapping and planning is a seamless and effective campaign, optimally targeted to suit a segmented audience. In order to produce a successful live marketing campaign, you need to consider how your plan overlaps with the rest of your marketing activities, as well as striking the perfect balance between your location, day of the week and quantity to achieve the required result. So, what are the factors that constitute a perfect plan?
In experiential marketing, your plan is the lifeblood of your campaign. As Sally Durcan, Hotcow MD, highlights, “the strategic plan needs to be understood, carefully researched, and must come before creative ideas”. According to Durcan, a key planning criteria is aligning your campaign with your overall marketing strategy, which will increase your brand recall rates. Additionally, a clear conceptual, strategic and platform knowledge are paramount in order to work towards your overall marketing goals.
Another key aspect of planning a successful live campaign is location. You should not only think about footfall, but also the mood of consumers at each proposed time and location. Your campaign should appease and excite consumers, as opposed to being perceived as a burden or unwelcome disruption to their journey. Durcan advises: “look outside the box, and don’t always follow the herd. The most popular locations are not always the right locations for you. It can mean you have to try harder to get noticed”.
A good example is Hotcow’s recent campaign for the launch of the LG Optimus 3D phone, which engaged consumers at numerous locations around the UK, combining fixed ‘Play Pod’ structures in 4 touch points, with a travelling ‘Play Mobile’ and ‘Play Team’ to target consumers on the move. According to Durcan, “going to a range of locations can revitalise your brand and message in the area and get better response rates due to a less cluttered environment”.
Additional planning consideration should be given to behind-the-scene logistics, which must not be overlooked. A strong, in-house operations team, is significant in order to manage and lead the systems and processes that run throughout the entirety of your campaign. Here at Hotcow, we fill a consultative role in the creation of experiences to achieve a specific goal. We have developed a bespoke Planning Model to simplify the strategic phase, helping us to come up with unique and innovative concepts to fit your brand’s marketing, PR and/or business goals. We have years of experience developing experiential campaigns from the initial brainstorming stage right through to post-campaign evaluation.
Contact Hotcow for experiential marketing advice, and all of your campaign planning, logistics and execution needs.
Hotcow is a multi-award winning brand engagement agency specialising in experiential marketing. Our mission is simple: to help brands understand the power of “experience-based marketing” and offer expertise in how to develop, plan and execute campaigns in the right way to get the right results.