Experiential marketing is a powerful tool that can help you create a memorable and engaging experience for your event attendees. It is a marketing strategy that focuses on creating an immersive experience that engages all the senses and leaves a lasting impression on attendees. Keep reading, because in this blog we’re going to give you our experiential marketing playbook to host massive events.
In our previous blog post, we explained what experiential marketing is, why it is important, and how it works. We also shared some examples of successful experiential marketing campaigns from different industries and topics. If you haven’t read it yet, you can check it out here.
In this blog post, we will show you how to create a successful experiential marketing campaign for your event, using a QR code game as an example. This is a fun and interactive way to engage your potential attendees and influencers, as well as to generate leads and conversions for your tickets and merchandise.
To create a successful experiential marketing campaign for your event, you need to follow these steps:
- Define your goals
- Know your audience
- Design your experience
- Execute your experience
- Evaluate your experience
We will explain each step in detail and provide some tips and examples to help you create a successful campaign, using our experiential marketing playbook, for your event.
Define Your Goals:
The first step is to define your goals for your experiential marketing campaign. What do you want to achieve with your campaign? Do you want to raise awareness, generate leads, drive sales, or create loyalty? How will you measure your success? What metrics will you use to evaluate your performance? For example, you could set a goal to increase your ticket sales by 10%, and use metrics such as the number of scans, visits, completions, shares, leads, and conversions to track your progress and results.
Know Your Audience:
The second step is to know your audience for your experiential marketing campaign. Who are you targeting with your campaign? What are their needs, preferences, and expectations? How can you reach them and engage them? What channels and platforms will you use to communicate with them? For example, you could target music lovers who are interested in your music festival, and use social media, email, and influencers to reach them and invite them to join your game.
Design Your Experience:
The third step is to design your experience for your experiential marketing campaign. What type of experience do you want to create for your audience? What elements and features will you include in your experience? How will you make your experience immersive, interactive, and memorable? How will you align your experience with your brand identity and values?
Here’s our playbook for a fictional music Festival called Luv Festival:
We’re going to create a QR code game that reveals clues for the acts that are performing at your music festival, and include elements and features such as trivia questions, puzzles, riddles, audio, video, image, points, badges, prizes, leaderboards, rankings, competitions, social media integration, sharing, referrals, email marketing, SMS marketing, push notifications, etc.
You could also make your experience immersive, interactive, and memorable by using different levels of difficulty, themes, and feedback. You could also align your experience with your brand identity and values by using your brand colors, logo, slogan, etc.
Execute your experience: Or Steal Our Experiential Marketing Playbook Below
The fourth step is to execute your experience for your experiential marketing campaign. How will you implement your experiential marketing campaign? What resources and tools will you need? What partners and vendors will you work with? How will you manage and coordinate your team and activities? How will you handle any challenges or risks?
In our example, you would simply need to use a QR code generator. There are plenty of free QR Code Generators online, but our favourite is the Adobe Express QR code generator. You could do a basic version of this experiential marketing campaign by using a landing page tool, with a quiz maker, and even a basic CRM tool. You’re almost certainly going to have to work with a few vendors. And you could also work with partners and vendors such as Crowdflo, AAC, Mailchimp, etc.
The reveal could come in the form of a quiz, cypher or puzzle. You could have a massive virtual puzzle to require attendees to complete the puzzle to slowly form a picture of each of your acts at the end. This would increase the engagement of your audience much more than just revealing each act slowly on Instagram. It makes your audience get hands-on and spend time engaging and creating the reveal themselves.
As we know in any form of marketing, the closer the connection and the greater the tie invested into a product or service someone is, the more likely they are to buy. It brings emotional investment, that will reflect in the ticket sales.
Evaluate your experience
The fifth and final step is to evaluate your experience for your experiential marketing campaign. How will you collect and analyze data and feedback from your experiential marketing campaign? What insights and learnings will you gain from your experience? How will you use them to improve your future experiential marketing campaigns, as well as other marketing strategies? For example, you could collect and analyze data and feedback from your experiential marketing campaign by using tools such as a dashboard tool, a reporting tool, a survey tool, a feedback tool, etc. You could also gain insights and learnings from your experience by using tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, etc. You could also use them to improve your future experiential marketing campaigns, as well as other marketing strategies, by using tools such as Google Optimize, Facebook Ads Manager, etc.
Here is a smaller, less immersive, but more easy to implement version of this playbook, by saying how publishing a QR code for event maps and set times/schedule on a wristband will make it easier and more intuitive for patrons to have a better experience:
Use Your Data to Re-Target: Experiential Marketing Playbook
The final step of your experiential marketing campaign is to use your data to re-target your audience and sell more tickets for your event. You have collected and analyzed a lot of data and feedback from your QR code game, and now you can use it to create personalized and relevant messages and offers for your audience, based on their interests, preferences, and behavior.
You can use a tonne of different tools and methods to re-target your audience, such as:
Email marketing:
You can send follow-up emails to your audience, reminding them of your event, and offering them incentives to buy your tickets, such as discounts, coupons, bundles, limited-time offers, etc. You can also use email segmentation and automation techniques to tailor your emails to your audience, based on their data and feedback.
SMS marketing:
You can send text messages to your audience, inviting them to your event, and providing them with useful information, such as the location, date, time, lineup, etc. of your event. You can also use SMS marketing to create urgency and scarcity, by sending countdowns, reminders, and last-minute offers to your audience.
Push notifications:
You can send push notifications to your audience, notifying them of your event, and encouraging them to buy your tickets, by using catchy headlines, emojis, images, etc. You can also use push notifications to create a sense of community and excitement, by sending updates, news, and sneak peeks of your event to your audience.
Social media ads:
You can create and run social media ads for your event, targeting your audience based on their demographics, interests, and behavior. You can also use social media ads to showcase your event, by using videos, images, testimonials, etc. Use social media ads to drive traffic to your landing page, where you can capture leads and conversions for your event.
Remarketing ads:
You can create and run remarketing ads for your event, targeting your audience who have already visited your landing page, played your QR code game, or expressed interest in your event, but have not yet bought your tickets. You can also use remarketing ads to re-engage your audience, by using different messages and offers, based on their stage in the customer journey.
By using your data to re-target your audience, you can increase your chances of selling more tickets for your event, and creating a loyal fan base for your brand. You can also use your data to measure the ROI of your experiential marketing campaign, and to improve your future campaigns.
So, there you have it. The five steps to create a successful experiential marketing campaign for your event, and our experiential marketing playbook to create a QR code game that reveals clues for the acts that are performing at your music festival. We hope you found this blog helpful, and we can’t wait to see you at our event!
