What Is Experiential Marketing?

Experiential marketing is the kind of marketing that connects with the consumer on multiple levels - it appeals not only to their emotions, but to their logic and senses.

To put it simply, experiential marketing focuses on the entire customer "experience" and what the consumers response is, rather than a certain individual marketing piece.

Consider the huge difference between traditional marketing and experiential marketing. Traditional marketing is going to try to "sell" the consumer of the features and benefits of something, while experiential marketing is going to allow the consumer to experience and test it for themselves. What do you think is going to be more effective? When applied correctly, experiential marketing is also the breadwinner when it comes to building brand loyalty and following.

As marketers, its always important to put yourself in the customers shoes. When they're viewing your marketing pieces, what kind of thoughts are going through the consumers minds? What are they feeling?

Experiential marketing is going to help you do that on many levels by creating a full customer experience. By engaging the consumer in many kinds of media platforms: visual ads, print ads, audio, and others you'll be able to guage the overall response of the entire brand and marketing campaign as a whole.

The fact of the matter is, people today are super busy. Everyone wakes up out of bed and has a vast to-do list: a soccer mom has to take the kids to school, the working professional is busy from 9-5 - thereafter he just doesn't want to be bothered, etc.. And marketers just aren't helping by trying to push the same tired old messages.

Experiential marketing is the greatest solution to reach these people. What's needed (and what very few marketers are doing) is a way to win over these consumers emotionally and personally, and literally connect them to your brand forever. This is what a winning experiential marketing campaign is going to do for you. The power behind it is enormous.

Marketing has really evolved leaps and bounds over the years. In the past general monologue marketing messages were created to target all consumers, putting them in one big bag. The problem with that is, markets are inherently different. For example, a teenager is going to feel differently about a certain message than an adult will.

Today, the customer needs to be involved with the marketing of your company, they don't want to be fed a monologue message, they want to engage in dialogue with your company.