Social Media & Experiential Marketing: A match made for Brands

“Social media will help you build up loyalty of your current customers to the point that they will willingly, and for free, tell others about you.” – Bonnie Sainsbury

Social Media is the new and thriving communication medium as well as tool, be it website or application based, which has enabled users to create and share content on various social media platforms through internet. While social media has not only transformed the way of living and thinking, but it has also changed how brands are marketing themselves today.

While experiential marketing is not a new marketing technique, it is about establishing a personal connection between brands and communicating it to the consumers by creating real-life experiences that are memorable. These experiences help in creating emotional bonds between brands and consumers. In short, experiential marketing uses a creative approach to design an experience that will connect with the brands and consumers.

Today, Social Media is the most influential tool for any successful experiential marketing campaign to reach its intended audience and benefit the brand’s objectives. Social media has such a wide influence today, since it’s the medium that connects users across the globe and, everyone has become well-versed and fluent with social networking, as everyone spends so much time on it. On the other hand, experiential marketing is the marketing tool, which helps in connecting consumers as well. So if you combine both the tools which help in connecting and communicating, the output is a successful experiential marketing campaign gone viral on social media platforms.

“Provide an experience that is useful, usable, desirable, and differentiated and you will create demand for your brand and delight your customer.” – David Armano (Edelman Digital)

The rising importance of experiential marketing has shown that a connection with the consumers can be harbored on its shoulders for creating a positive quality image of a brand and create a place in the hearts and minds of a brand’s target audience.

So what happens now?

Now, if experiential marketing steps in with social media for marketing a brand, the reach of the brand increases immensely such that not only will the future prospects increase, but the consumers’ involvement and consumers engagement will also increase. Since through social media platforms, one is able to share their experiences in real-time and this arrangement of social media with experiential marketing makes the consumers feel more connected to the brands, and eventually the brands also come closer in reaching to the consumer expected satisfaction.

Since social media is all about engaging the users with the right content, experiential marketing also follows the same guidelines engaging through right content plus campaigning. The way social media makes its users get involved in social networking such that it becomes a part of their life; similarly, experiential marketing also engages the mind and senses of the consumers, such that they feel a part of the campaign.

I personally feel that experiences either make or break a brand’s reputation and feedback is the experience that consumers have with a brand; and through social media and experiential marketing, one receives an instant feedback from the consumers. So, it’s necessary that any successful experiential marketing strategy should keep in mind that today’s consumer is as smart as the technology in his palm, since it’s through social networking only, a lot of information is available to them 24×7.

How? How? How?

The social media helps in understanding the consumer behavior by providing brands and consumers, a platform to share & exchange their experiences which can then help brands to better themselves and deliver experientially correct marketed efforts and understand the consumers better.

Experiential marketing thus provides an authentic marketing strategy using social media platforms to its advantage, by breaking through the clutter of social media information that a consumer is inordinately supplied with; which impacts a brand’s sales growth, increases a brand’s consumer awareness and provides many opportunities to interact with the consumers in a uniquely efficient way.

So, it’s my advice that for a brand to enjoy the perks of social media benefits fully, engage in charting-out a successful experiential marketing campaign and the results may surprise you!

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