With the new year among us, marketers are going to be discovering and refining their ways of approaching customers as well as crafting experiences in ways that haven’t been seen before. Experiential Marketing will be their path to success.
Brands are beginning to realize that in addition to the success of large events and experiential marketing campaigns that you don’t need to draw in tens of thousands of people to be successful. In fact the more exclusive an event, the more interesting things can get.
Here are some marketing trends that we expect to see this year:
1.) Better Integration of Social Media into Events
If an event isn’t share-worthy you have to ask whether it should have existed to begin with. The Goal isn’t always to get thousands of people into one room, but rather to get conversations stirring on social media.
In many activations, specifically pop-up shops over the course of 2015 only had about 150 to 200 people present. However, each one of the attendees were generating social chatter on their mobile devices talking about how cool these activations were. The real impressions are being made online during these times.
The goal is to make it share-worthy. Make it easy for consumers to share the content that’s available at the event. Clearly call out the designated hashtags using messaging, and give them something exciting to share. If it’s boring, throw it out.
2.) Integrating the Consumer into building social good / progress
Many Experiential Marketing Activations are allowing consumers to consider brands in relevant and meaningful ways. Consumers don’t just consider the brand’s product or service, they want to see what brands stand for, specifically social good. Brands are starting to get the consumer involved in creating social movements for good.
3.) FOMO ( fear of missing out ) by Design
There are many who suffer from the anxiety of missing out. Be that an event, a tv show, their favorite movie or even the ice cream man. People get anxiety when they think they might miss out on something significant.
I think that we’re going to see FOMO by design this year, by injecting social media users with content that will make them want to be at the event, building it’s interest, then applying strategies to make it as if the consumer is actually there, while at home.
Interactive live feeds, social integration into components at the activation site, gamification which can allow users at home and at the activation to compete with each other, etc.
4.) Virtual Reality
This week Oculus announced their new headset being released to the public. This will trickle down into the experiential world, by granting access to this project on a mass scale. Not only are brands aware of this technology but now consumers have access to the technology which will allow them to communicate with people from vast distances or experience things from their homes that they would have never had the ability to do so otherwise. Maybe we’ll begin to see the integration of consumers at home into events happening far away via Virtual Reality?
5.) More areas for performance metrics
As technology advances and brands learn more about consumer behaviors, we will begin to see more performance metrics and a better ability to measure the success of an event by measuring metrics at focal points instead of impressions. Perhaps how many social media profiles that were at the event shared vs how many shared that weren’t at the event. How many consumers tried a particular product, or showed interest in a particular product. Which people spent the most time over here instead of over there. With app monitoring as well as the integration of physical sensors at events, marketers will be able to track consumer behavior in more intelligent ways, creating more intelligent metrics and insight.
If you have questions about experiential marketing, content marketing, or pop-up shops, contact BeCore today!