How to make your brand unforgettable | 4 strategies for effective experiential marketing

Do you feel like your marketing isn’t quite packing the punch that’s needed to put your competitors on the back foot? Are you looking for the right vehicle to really drive your branded messages into your target demographic’s headspace?

In today’s fast-evolving business landscape, it’s crucial to find innovative ways to make your brand memorable and stand out from your competitors. Experiential marketing offers a powerful solution by creating immersive and engaging experiences that leave a lasting impression on your target audience.

Here are the best strategies to take when beginning to experiment with experiential marketing.

1. Devise a shared experience people will remember

To make your brand unforgettable, tie an event or an expedition to your promotion that people can follow. Your new product or service may well be the best in its class and a game changer in waiting, but tying it to an event can allow it to transcend your usual marketing environment and capture the imagination of whole new customer bases.

For example, how many extra pairs of Alphafly’s did Nike sell for tying development and promotion of the shoe around Kipchoge breaking the 2-hour limit in the marathon? How many extra pairs of running shoes across their ranges did they sell as a result of that?

Probably a lot, but perhaps more importantly, of the bigger shoe companies, they cemented their market position as the athlete-first running shoe brand. Experiential marketing can be as much about controlling customer perception of your brand as it is about impacting your bottom line in the short term.

By creating a shared experience, whether that’s something to follow and talk about, or a live event, you can build a sense of community and generate excitement around your brand. Whether it’s a virtual treasure hunt, a themed challenge, or a collaborative project, make sure it’s something unique and memorable that people will talk about long after the experience is over.

You don’t necessarily need an elite athlete to break an unbreakable barrier, you just need to capture people’s imaginations, and create some excitement that can shine some of its light back on your brand.

2. Focus on unique, personalised experiences for your customer to stand out in an automated world

In an increasingly automated world, the personal touch can go a long way. Think beyond the traditional marketing methods and consider how you can create unique experiences for your customers to create positive emotions. Think about the Maya Angelou quote:

[…] People will never forget how you made them feel.

This might be one of the easiest ways to incorporate experiential marketing. For example, think about the presentation of goods purchased through your eCommerce site – think about the unboxing experience. How refreshing is it when you open a package and you can tell that the company or person who put it all together really thought about the experience of opening it? Also, consider if someone buys your product and makes an unboxing video that gets a bit of traction – that could in turn lead to more sales and recommendations.

3. Create gamification experiences which can challenge and engage audiences at your events

The Drimify gamification platform allows you to customise highly immersive playable experiences to challenge and engage your audience at live events. You could build a multi-level experience that educates your attendees about a new service or product launch, with spot prizes from instant win games running throughout, and distributing a promotional code for attendees upon completion. The idea here is to tie your brand to a fun experience, something the people who participate will remember and associate with your brand.

You can take a phygital approach to this – that is leveraging the advantages of physical spaces and digital technology to create synergy. A phygital approach allows you to deliver a seamless and immersive journey for participants. Consider teasing the event experience online beforehand to drum up interest and create hype, then offer your interactive experience live at your event.

You could invert this by having a playable experience exclusive to the event, but then a second experience for more participation that runs on your website. The first experience could almost act as a soft launch of the game, alongside the launch of the product or service, allowing you to optimise the version that’s later made available across your public channels.

Inspiration: Let’s suppose you’re a sports club launching your new season’s kit. You could create a fun branded game customised in the team’s colours and logos, with the top 100 players all being entered into a prize drawn to win the new kits signed by your star player at the end of the season. You could have QR codes around your stadium for attendees to scan and play, with a mandatory data form to enter with an optional opt-in box for your marketing newsletter.

The more on-brand this is, the more effective it’ll be. As well as numerous classic games, Drimify gives you options to customise games around American football, football, rugby, and basketball, with more to come in the future.

4. Gamify physical spaces, and engage users in their environment

For example, if you wanted to encourage users to explore a new facility or venue you’d opened, you could create a digital treasure hunt, with clues to unlock password protected levels hidden in the different areas you want players to explore.

You could install touch screen terminals at specific attractions or features for visitors to play location specific games, or even install QR codes at specific spots for users to play through certain modules on their mobile devices.

Pro tip: Use gamification to personalise a prize winning experience.

On any games you create on Drimify, you have the option to customise your data collection form. As well as the necessary details like name and email address, you can ask for less necessary details which you can use to personalise the winner’s experience. Think of highly personal (but inoffensive) things, like asking their favourite song, or the song they find most motivational.

In practice, let’s say you’re the shoe sponsor for a big city marathon. As well as winning a pair of shoes on the Instant Win, you could have their motivational song playing as they enter mile 18 (commonly thought of by most recreational athletes as the start of the hardest portion of the marathon). This gives them a relevant prize, and tailors their experience to make it even more memorable.

Key takeaway

Experiential marketing is a highly effective way to build loyalty, tell brand stories, and maximise your impact as a business.

Effective experiential marketing is more about creativity and precision than throwing your advertising budget at something. Each experiential campaign is a unique, nuanced undertaking, but the 4 approaches listed here are great starting points that are easy to action.