Experiential brand activation of all types is filling the present day’s marketing event arena. Experiential marketing concentrates specifically on building real-life & hands-on experiences to gain a higher target group.
This helps to support their rising needs & even keeps them engaged through meaningful experiences that assist in deepening brand-customer relation.
One such crucial advantage of hiring an experiential marketing agency is the enduring impression & sense of loyalty towards the brand that it creates among the target group.
Experiential marketing might appear similar to event marketing, which actually is not surprising as such experiential strategies & campaigns are generally event-centric.
However, such live events are more inclined towards event management, event planning & execution.
They even lean at catering an immersive live experience & are generally standalone i.e not a part of massive events such as trade fair, product launches, music festival, mobile tours & other kinds of corporate happenings.
Note that in experiential marketing agencies, the event marketers are there to pull off the main events you would want as they will have the routine project plan & even the relevant people for it.
Such are the resources that an experiential marketing agency that essentially specializes in event production & corporate event should even have. However, the major difference is such agencies approach every event like their first.
Here are ways how a sports brand can appoint a good experiential marketing agency.
Conduct your due diligence
You have performed your research & got a few experiential agencies that appear a good match for your brand. However, before you communicate with any of them, you must examine their background.
Discuss with your colleagues & the agency’s various other clients for in-depth research. Ensure to research both online and offline. Once you are convinced with the agency, ensure to schedule a meetup. In the meeting, ensure to know for how long the experiential marketing agency has been in this business.
Ask regarding their corporate culture & examine their current & past work. Review their portfolio & ask to view examples of their marketing campaigns & how they have assisted other clients to enhance brand awareness.
Is the experiential marketing agency very big or small? How many employees do they have? To whom will you get access for discussing or clearing your doubts?
What procedures do they utilize to deliver the client requirements? Having knowledge of all of this will endow you with confidence that they may be the correct experiential marketing agency for you.
Find the agency with good experience in this field with the same target as yours
Opting for an agency without viewing their experience in the industry with the same targets indicates that you would have to offer them training on regular environments, nuances & regulations.
This can be extremely expensive & time consuming & ultimately you will not be sure enough whether the agency will be able to manage and complete your campaigns & projects successfully.
Thus, benchmarking the top-notch practices from various other agencies can be of great help. Also, it will be wise of you to look out for an experiential marketing agency that has easily pulled off the same endeavours before & have learned well from the previous experiences & mistakes or errors.
In case they have never planned a digital marketing tactic to meet targets the same as yours, they might not have a similar level of expertise or commitment in their experiential marketing. Look at their core potentials – if you require pop up, sampling or any mobile tour activation & what you view is just high profile festivals & concerts or just digital experiences, you must keep your search on.
Communicate with the team
Relation between the marketing agency & client requires to have some chemistry. No matter if it is generally working with the account director or VP of the marketing agency, the relationship must be authentic.
Ensure you do not get handed off to a staff who is entry-level for communicating all your ongoing programs.
The live experience of your contact is a direct relation to the program’s success. Experiential agencies must be willing enough to know your global or national brand on deeper levels for understanding your vision and mission.
They must gain adequate insight relating to your brand to understand what kind of experiential campaigns and live events would work well for you & get people/audiences talking just about your sports brand.
Thus, you as a brand should schedule a specific date for the meeting, go to their premises & have the whole team with whom you will work introduced to you.
Try to analyze if the marketing agency is able to understand what your brand needs are
Best experiential marketing agencies at times can be persuasive. Their salespeople & business may show you revolutionary & never before presented ideas that appear flashy & big.
However, do not get excited as an idea is just good & has the potential or ability to change the entire world of marketing if on launch it works.
Agency requires to understand who you actually are, what are the values, how you should engage audiences & what you should fulfil. If they fail to ask relevant questions, then it means they are putting on a flashy show.
Assist the agency to get a clearer view of your brand by sharing with the customer’s experiences and needs.
Need of integration
Choose experiential marketing businesses that understand the whole marketing ecosystem & know how to drive consumer perception, customer stories and brand awareness.
For integrating the branded experience the correct way, they must examine which channel you should use for determining how other channels can extend their support for you. Also, you will want to look at what ad copies they create for you based on your unique brand voice.
A well-integrated marketing approach delivers better results. In an overall marketing strategy or place, experiential marketing should not be separated from various other marketing endeavours like content marketing, social media marketing, public relation, influencer marketing etc.
Discuss in-depth their strategy
Each marketing or event management agency has its own way of conducting experiential campaigns. When getting in touch to discuss offers, ensure to know how they perform market research, conduct planning, approach event production & leverage the consumer behaviour & data insights to build an experiential marketing campaign.
There are various advertising and marketing agencies that even provide turnkey services. However, ensure whether they will be able to recognize gaps in measurement or delivery from before? If not then they will show you outcomes that are difficult to calculate.
Ensure to ask if they will provide customized approaches? Also, examine if they consider your goals & challenges? And how do they prepare to record & amplify the customer based stories?
A well-thought marketing strategy is the ground of any well planned branded experience & every experiential agency should have a procedure they try to abide by when collaborating with the new partner. Ensure to assess their processes/systems to see if you find it correct.
Ask how to do the agency measure success
When concerning, content marketing, social media marketing or other kinds of digital marketing, a number of likes are what measure a brands success. Before selecting a top-notch experiential agency, you require seeing & agreeing with their KPIs that they intend at tracking.
It should all be discussed upfront as campaigns require to be measured and monitored on an ROI basis. So, if your sports brand looks at connecting with their end consumers emotionally, ensure to ask your agency what KPIs will they track?
In case you look for a word of mouth tactic, how will the campaign get audiences talking about your brand? And if you opt for AR or augmented reality or VR or virtual reality experience, what will be the topmost crucial KPI you should track? Know which marketing automation system do they depend on? Get a sample from the agency to view what kind of data or info you would get from such a campaign & how they will assess the success.
An experiential marketing agency that you plan to hire should be capable of endowing you with the correct immersive experience & everlasting impression of your campaign.
If you have any doubt regarding their potential or your intuition enlightens you that they are an incorrect match for your brand.
Take the necessary steps to choose the correct one as per your requirements. Selecting the right agency is the initial step towards business relationships that require having trust and enormous friendship.
