Experiential Hill

There are a few things that people may be unaware of when it comes to experiential marketing:

1. Experiential marketing is more than just event marketing: Experiential marketing encompasses a wide range of interactive marketing techniques that go beyond just hosting events. These techniques can include immersive brand experiences, interactive product demonstrations, and more.
2. It can be more effective than traditional advertising: Experiential marketing can be more effective than traditional advertising because it allows consumers to directly engage with a brand and its products or services in a meaningful way. This can create a more lasting impression and drive higher levels of brand loyalty.
3. It requires careful planning and execution: Experiential marketing campaigns require careful planning and execution to be successful. This includes identifying the target audience, developing a clear strategy and messaging, and choosing the right tactics and channels to reach the audience.
4. It can be expensive: Experiential marketing campaigns can be expensive to execute, as they often require a significant investment in resources such as staffing, materials, and equipment. However, the potential return on investment can be high if the campaign is successful.
5. It can involve a range of marketing channels: Experiential marketing can involve a range of marketing channels, including social media, email marketing, and other digital marketing channels, as well as offline channels such as in-store experiences and events.

Measuring the effectiveness of an experiential marketing campaign can be challenging, as it involves evaluating intangible factors such as consumer emotions and brand perception. However, there are a few key metrics that can be used to gauge the success of an experiential marketing campaign, including:

• Attendance: This can be a good indicator of the campaign’s reach and popularity.
• Engagement: This can be measured by the level of interaction and participation from consumers during the campaign.
• Social media activity: This can include metrics such as likes, shares, and comments on social media posts related to the campaign.
• Sales: This can be an important metric for determining the campaign’s overall impact on the business.
• Customer feedback: Collecting feedback from consumers who participated in the campaign can provide valuable insights into their experience and the campaign’s effectiveness.

By tracking these metrics, it is possible to get a sense of the campaign’s overall impact and identify areas for improvement in future campaigns.

I’m quite sure that you have asked yourself that question at some point or another. Truth be told, it is interesting to note that, logically speaking, there shouldn’t be any reason for someone with a huge budget, especially big companies like Coca-Cola to constantly advertise their product.

After all, we all know what Cola is, how it tastes like and where to get it, so why the heck does their advertising team ostentatiously throw money down the drain?!

To really get an accurate answer to such an inquiry, we will have to look at several features, starting from the human psyche to the ways our social influences compel us to act in certain ways.

Let’s start with the way the human brain works: Nobody wakes up, gets out of bed and spends twenty minutes of their time thinking about a product they saw on TV three months ago.

This goes to say that our attention spans are extremely limited and oftentimes, we are too caught up in the now to really ponder on other things.

That means that if I, as an average human being, just woke up, I will probably think about how long I have till I have to go to work, what’s on the menu or what problems I have to deal with.

This leaves almost zero room for your product, as it just doesn’t hold any immediate importance to our mammal brains.

Until, you guessed it, we see an advertisement for the product.

That sets a motion in tact which starts turning our gears, reminding of us of our connection with said product: When we used it last time, how much it costs, what it tastes like…

As we can see, even without our conscious consent, a shift in our thoughts is already transpiring.

We might not go out and immediately decide on a purchase, but that product is now part of our headspace and that my friends, is what advertising is all about.

The goal of a company is for their product to become an integral part of your life, without you ever realizing or questioning it. This might sound a bit grim, but if we imagine your unwillingness to tolerate ads to be your immune system and the ads being viruses, then picture what would happen if viruses found a way to mimic your bodies bacteria!?

Exactly, they wouldn’t get killed by your immune system!

The same goes for advertisement and as people are becoming more and more resilient towards the traditional marketing spiels we remember watching on our state-of-the-art TV screens, so does the game of advertising fundamentally change.

This has precipitated the birth of experiential marketing, where the goal of an advertiser is to turn their product into something the end-user will have a deep and long-last emotional connection too!

To keep to the point, another reason why huge budgets are being spent is creating an illusion of scarcity.

Let me explain it a bit more in detail; You see, consumers most often stick to one brand and one brand only. That doesn’t mean that their choices can’t be altered but believe me, this is why the big brass suck up all the advertising space.

If you, as a consumer, crave for a soda, how many different sodas are you going to be able to name?

‘’Easy pickings, I know a lot of sodas! There’s Cola, Pepsi, Fanta, Sprite…’’

What if I told you that three of these products are owned by none other but the Coca-Cola company and PepsiCo, the progenitor of Pepsi and a few other, well-known products such as Frito-Lay, Tropicana, Gatorade, and Gatorade.

Here’s an even better example, let’s take the outrage by consumers when they heard that Nestle peddled and sold baby food, instead of letting people do it the natural way.

When water supplies got scarce, Nestle simply moved away, leaving thousands to starve.

A huge campaign was launched to boycott all of their products, but people soon realized that it wasn’t as easy as imagined.

They literally own a product in every niche, same as the other big companies, creating a false illusion of choice, with there being none.

Do you know why HudsonDrink never made it as an option in your bucket list? Because the bigwigs controlling our advertising space bought out all the available ads!

I hope that this article has brought you a bit closer to the truth and made you realize just how tight-knit our choices really are.

As over two billion people have joined the ranks of various social media sites, it’s very important, as a company or business, to understand just how massive and enormous advertising on these platforms has become.

In this article, we will be listing down the five main things that should be in your grip if you are interested in social media advertising!

• Target Consumers Like Never Before

With all the nifty tools and add-ons social media platforms in the likes of Instagram or Facebook bestow us with, it has never been easier to laser down the perfect consumer base for any of your products.

Not only can you select age, sex, location, race and so on but as people trust these companies, they are handing out their private information for free!

That means that you could potentially target a remarried Asian woman that moved three times and has exactly two sons, one daughter and a love for Corn Flakes, not that we are implying anything.

• Test Our All Of Your Advertising Ideas

I’ve often found myself baffled by the extravagant fees advertisers had to pay just to get into a magazine or billboard.

To make things worse, it was oftentimes a longer-term contract and changing the content of your advertisement was always a hassle, and sometimes, not possible.

Nowadays, you can open-up hundreds of Facebook campaigns, leave them to run until they spend 5$, track which ads performed the best, rinse and repeat until you get a definite winner!

It has made advertising much more approachable and profitable for smaller companies which is a giant plus for newly-found businesses.

• It Can Be Free Or Quite Costly

Since anyone can open a free account on almost all social media platforms, one good, informative post or a meme that many people can relate to can and will boost your social media page to the moon.

When such a thing happens, you are basically getting hundreds, sometimes even thousands of visitors to your site, which will than translate into customers.

Best thing of all, you didn’t have to spend a dime!

On the other hand, bidding wars on competitive products can become quite outrageous and It isn’t unheard of that some companies pay up to a thousand dollars for just one click on an advertisement!

• Some Social Media Platforms Just Won’t Cut It!

Different platforms contain different users and with that being a given, you’ll have to do a lot of testing as one product could literally be a goldmine on one site, while completely failing to impress on another!

That’s why, before leaping into any kind of advertising adventure, you always have to read your audience and clairvoyantly predict what sort of reaction they will have on certain things.

This task is made easier by all the tools and information a platform bestows you with

 

• More Media, Less Text!

 

It is not surprising that images, info slides and videos get proportionally more likes, shares and other social signals in comparison to text.

You have to understand that the era of the written word is coming to an end, given that the average user span has vastly deteriorated within the last decade, you’ll have to tell a story of a thousand words by some other means!

To sum up, although social media advertising can make your company surge like nothing before, it can also frustrate and ail you with all sorts of problems.

As easy as it is to build reputation and gain exposure, the same applies for the other way around; Once your reputation is tarnished, there won’t be an easy way out!

All in all, it’s a double-edged sword that requires patience, a lot of research and meticulous perseverance to succeed!

Let’s stop pretending that the world of advertising hasn’t fundamentally changed in the last few years.

All tangible, palpable and ‘real life’ advertising props, especially magazines and newspapers, have seen massive downscales and the trend doesn’t seem to be halting any time soon.

There are so many reasons that such a massive change is transpiring but let’s just go ahead and name the three biggest stepping-stones that have catapulted online advertising and completely demolished any sort of magazine ads.

To start off, we would have to look at magazine ads themselves and determine where they lack in comparison to online ads.

What is important to consider is that most people don’t like ads and especially shy away from products that don’t interest them. For a magazine that operates in a certain niche, let’s say fashion, it will be extremely difficult to pitch a product that will encompass the interests of most readers.

It becomes even grimmer when you realize that you basically have to fill your magazine with heaps and heaps of ads, that aren’t even properly targeted to an audience that would appreciate them, only to have a chance of scoring a few conversions.

The biggest downside of such an approach is that you create an atmosphere where your readers are paying you to blast them with ads.

Quite conversely, most online content is free and readily accessible from anywhere and at any point in time.

No natural disasters or any other outside influences prevents the user from accessing your information in record speed.

The second important thing to note is the way the online community works.

Instead of having five or six broad sections, as usually seen in magazines, you will have hundreds if not thousands of communities built around one compartment!

This means that you can instantaneously target the users that would be ideal for your product. Google AdWords or Facebook, for example, allow you to choose between gender, sex, race and all sorts of tiny preferences.

What can the magazines offer in return?

Basically nothing and that’s why they are rapidly falling out of style.

Another interesting point is the fact that people engage and sometimes spend years festering friendships and relationships in such communities, creating an absolutely massive emotional connection.

Do you know what’s best? As an advertiser, you are basically being offered free reign over such a congregation, on a silver platter!

There simply isn’t a better way to peddle a product and marketing experts soon took notice of that.

The last thing on our bucket list is the costly fashion of magazine ads. You have to comprehend the fact that magazine owners need to make a steady profit as they are in a constant state of urgency when it comes to money.

This is precipitated by the lavish prices of the tools needed to print the magazine. Once you have submitted an ad, you sign a contract that lasts anywhere between thirty days and a year.

This is quite the investment to make and if the ad isn’t well received by the user base, you’re basically screwed!

I hope that you now understand why magazines are having such a hard time keeping their heads up and why we are mostly likely going to witness their complete dilapidation within our lifetime.

Even mid-sized advertising companies have so many embellishing titles and job names that it can sometimes be pretty tough to distinguish between them and their roles.

For examples sake, you have the marketing executive, director, officer, manager, etc.

Don’t forget that this is just one branch!

Regular people oftentimes don’t bother with the monikers at all and mix them all into one cup but that’s not the professional way to go about things.

Today, we’ll be exploring the valiant role of a marketing coordinator in an advertising company and why knowing what his function entails is so important!

Let’s start with the nuts and bolts; The first thing every marketing coordinator does is to assist his team members with special knowledge that only he has possession of.

You can imagine him to be an onlooker from the outside, having a better and larger perspective over the entire advertising project.

After the fundamentals of the task at hand have been established, it is him that adds that extra bit of flavoring that could make or break the entire deal!

You would be surprised at how just small changes in detail can be the difference of launching a profitable campaign to running the company towards the bottom of the sea!

The second important role, a bit more secretive than the others, is snooping on the competition and see what they are up to.

This can be done in a myriad of ways and it mostly isn’t what you’ve seen in the movies: He won’t become a double agent for an adjacent company and then betray both businesses for a third deal with the Russians!

No, it will be done in a much more simple and crude way; He might pretend to be a customer and walk around the premises just to observe how FAR and how DEVELOPED the competition is.

To keep it short: The main info he is trying to strip is how far the competition is lagging behind or how far his company needs to go in order to be able to take a shot at a more developed business!

Next in line would definitely be online presence.

A marketing coordinator is the quintessential figure in that entire realm as he is the one that appoints the logo designers, content writers, handles digital business-to-business deals and so on.

Over the years, as the online community has grown from ‘that thing the nerds like to do’ towards ‘if you aren’t online, you’ve been living under a rock’, such a shift in perspective has caused advertising companies to put a lot more resources and time into the entire ordeal.

This has made the task of being a marketing coordinator profoundly important.

It’s important to note that besides just dealing with the companies own social media presence, he is also obligated to monitor how social trends are changing and what sort of effect that has on his company.

A case in point example would have to be the picking up of new marketing techniques, such as experiential marketing, over the bland and outdated, traditional spiels.

Good marketing coordinators would jump in on it, test it out and see if it works for their type of business and carefully observe if such a style is feasible with their business model.

This brings me to my last point in this write-up, the most valuable thing a marketing coordinator can do for his advertising company is keeping his attitude transparent and liberal.

New things are spawning left and right and while hopping from one idea to another isn’t the smartest thing to do, being open enough to consider everything is a trait that pays off in the long run!

If the Internet has shown us anything in all these years of operation, it is that we are a lot more gullible and emotional than previously thought.

It is not the immaculately dressed salesman in a direct, confident voice, pitching a ‘revolutionary’ product by telling us why a purchase would be the rational thing to do, all delivered in a black-and- white TV set but a simple, yet inviting smile of a young child next to the brand logo.

Can’t catch my stride?

The thing is, regular consumers have finally seen through the marketing spiels of dealers and now do their best to avoid them like the plague!

If they, if so much, catch a sniff of someone trying to peddle a product, they will either change the channel, exit the site or throw the magazine in the trash.

This is only one of the many reasons why businesses are now actively seeking ways of establishing an emotional connection with their consumer.

Have you ever wondered just how much money a company has to spend to get a small shot in between the big game that is being played?

We are talking about six or seven figures and that’s not something to be taken lightly.

If you have to pay such an amount any time you want a consumer to be reminded of your product, you will never break even!

That’s why, instead of shooting for the quick buck, companies are aiming for the long game. If a company is able to equate the very emotionally driven and fun activity of football to buying and drinking a glass of Coca-Cola, then they have built a long-lasting ad inside of the targets brain.

Every time a new football game is on TV, the mind will, either consciously or subconsciously, match the screws and naturally seek for a glass of soda, as that is what we need to really enjoy a game of football!

I hope that you are now starting to understand the magic behind experiential marketing, but believe me, this is only half of the story!

What is so amazing about this practice and this brings us to the third point, is that your consumers become the driving force behind your brand.

The best example that I could find would be the way Red Bull markets their cans. Even if you have been living under a rock, you must have heard of the Red Bull girls.

They are basically handing out a free can of soda in exchange for a smile and a picture with two beautiful vixens. Just sit back for a moment and revel in the ingenuity of such a practice.

Not only are you more inclined to become a regular purchaser as you are tying such a positive experience to the drink, but they can use your visage for the purpose of experiential marketing!

Taken even further, they could handout free T-Shirts or any other cheap product, like bumper stickers, and they will have free, lifetime advertising just because they have taken the time to engage with the customer.

Absolutely brilliant!

Last but not least, experiential marketing does something where all other practices fail. Not only does it connect the user to the product but also to other people with similar interests.

Considering just how lonely our interconnected world has become, and how many people struggle to uphold simple relationships, creating meeting points, like charity marathons, is yet another step towards your company being seen as both considerate, empathetic and lastly, valuable.

We are here talking about a level of bond that cannot be reached by any other means and that is why companies are all over experiential campaigns!