Do you know how to make the most of your experiential marketing event? Are you looking for new and meaningful ways to connect with your target audience?
Experiential marketing allows you to connect with people and create memorable experiences. Plus, if you have the right strategy, it really works! A successful brand-in-hand experience results in an 85% purchase intention.
If you’re planning an experiential event soon, you need to make sure that you have the right strategy in place. Focusing on hyper-local marketing is one effective way to do so. Here are five tips for making your event hyper-local.
1. Appeal to Your Local Community
Hyper-local marketing targets customers in very specific areas. Rather than an entire city, this type of local brand marketing might only focus on a single neighborhood or even a few streets.
The intention is to target consumers that look for local searches “near me.” These customers love to shop local and support their neighborhood businesses. The main goal is to encourage foot traffic to your business.
That means that you need to make your marketing event feel local. Take note of the local high school sports teams, the popular hangouts, icons, and features that define the neighborhood you’re focusing on. Customers should feel like your business is a part of the community.
Doing so makes your brand seem more genuine and can help you connect with your customers in meaningful ways.
2. Hone Your Experiential Marketing Tactics
There are many types of experiential marketing, and the first step is to figure out the mood of the event and the type of tactics you plan to use to reach your target audience.
Here are some common locations and types of experiential marketing:
- Festivals
- Trade shows
- Retreats
- Business events
- Samplings
- Demos
- Games or activities
- Augmented reality
You want to understand the tone of the event. For instance, the mood at a festival will be different from the mood at a trade show. As such, the tactics you use might be slightly different depending on your location.
Creating a winning strategy is the first step in making memorable experiences. Our team at the Auctus Agency takes your goals and creates a memorable and high-quality experience designed to attract attention and bring in more customers.
3. Understand Your Limitations
Whether you’ve done an experiential event in the past or this is your first time, it’s easy to get swept up in the desire to push a buy local approach and make mistakes.
For instance, you can’t be everything to everyone. Not everyone that walks by your display will become a customer.
If you want to make the most of experiential marketing, you need to make your target audience as small as possible. That’s why hyper-local marketing is the best method for success.
You’re targeting consumers that are looking for a specific product or service very close to their home. Whether it’s cable and internet service, a real estate agent, or a local restaurant, these are the people that are most likely to convert to customers.
It’s also important to go into the event prepared, which means understanding your goals and having an actionable plan to achieve them. Your goals might be to raise brand awareness, increase traffic, or boost sales of a recently launched product. Outline these goals well in advance of the event, and work with an experiential marketing agency to achieve them.
Understand your limitations and what you’re capable of achieving on your own. You might have a firm understanding of your target audience, including the demographics and their needs, but do you know how to appeal to them? What kind of experiences would win them over?
Experiential marketing companies have the knowledge and the experience to help you craft a unique and lasting experience. Not only will you increase brand awareness, but you’ll connect with the community and boost sales as well.
4. Focus on Experiences
If you want to make your marketing event a success, you have to remember that experiential marketing focuses on the experience.
What will be memorable, and what will make the most impact? How can you tie in the community? What are the big issues, and how can your company help?
Let’s look at some popular experiential marketing examples.
In 2019, Tinder celebrated Pride Week by unveiling a 30-foot rainbow slide ride in New York’s Flatiron District. The slide represented 30 US states that don’t protect the LGBT+ community from discrimination. For every person that went down the slide, Tinder donated $10 toward the efforts to support the Equality Act.
Tinder created an extremely memorable brand experience that also enabled people to take action and support a cause they believed in.
Lean Cuisine’s #WeighThis campaign was inspired by the idea that if you’re going to weigh someone, you should weigh what matters.
The goal was to encourage women to focus on what they value and their accomplishments rather than their body image and weight. The campaign was designed to help make people proud and inspired by who they are.
Again, this type of experiential marketing focused on the experience, the lessons learned, and the memories created.
5. Offer Value
What do people gain by interacting with your brand? Offering consumers something of value can help raise interest and increase the chances they’ll become customers.
If you’re focusing on a hyper-local approach, there are many ways you could offer value. For instance, you might present samples if you’re a local restaurant. Maybe you give away freebies such as pens, fans, water bottles, or so on to encourage them to stop by your shop.
Letting customers interact with your product is another way to get them interested in your brand. If you’re a makeup company, for instance, you might have a “mini-makeover” station set up.
People can see first-hand how well your product works and how it can make their life better.
Education is another way to offer value. Consultations, micro-lessons, educational videos, and so on can provide the customer with valuable information.
Make Your Marketing Event a Success
When you focus on a hyper-local approach, you can make your experiential marketing event a huge success. You’re targeting the consumers that matter most and creating unique experiences they’re sure to love and remember.
Auctus can help you create a winning campaign. We have a network of more than 50,000 brand ambassadors, and we cover over 375 major metro areas. We can help you with everything from creating a marketing strategy to providing event staffing.
Call us now or fill out our contact form to get started planning your next event today.
