Categories
Events Marketing

Why Brands Should Embrace Experiential Marketing

In today’s world, it’s harder than ever to get the attention of consumers. Brands are always looking for new ways to stand out against all the noise and truly engage their customers. An increasing amount of businesses are turning to experiential marketing, which offers immersive, memorable campaigns that help deliver a brand’s message without distractions.

So, What Exactly is Experiential Marketing?

Experiential marketing has been a buzzword over recent years and is gaining increasing momentum in the marketing world. This powerful campaign strategy brings a whole new light to the way consumers experience a brand.

Experiential marketing focuses on direct engagement with consumers by using creative interactions to leave a lasting impression. These experiences could include a live event or a pop-up installation. Its central focus is to provide consumers with a live, engaging experience.

Many brands have found huge success in experiential marketing. Check out some great examples of successful campaigns below.

JetBlue- The Icebreaker

Who doesn’t want to take a trip to the beach in the middle of freezing cold winter? JetBlue airlines used this opportunity to promote their new direct flights from New York to Palm Springs in a very clever way. They put various summer-themed prizes such as beach attire, golf clubs, and free tickets to Palm Springs inside a huge block of ice and told passing New Yorkers that anything was up for grabs.

A social media campaign was launched along with this unique experiential strategy, resulting in a huge success for JetBlue. Everyone loves free stuff, right? Giving away prizes in a unique, creative way gave consumers an engaging experience they wouldn’t forget.

Gatorade Combine

The Gatorade brand is widely known for its close association with professional sports. To create an engaging experience for consumers, Gatorade used experiential marketing strategies to test individual athletic abilities in the form of a combine. A combine is an examination of athletic skills that athletes must complete before going to the professional league. Gatorade worked with a number of companies such as Xbox, Kinect, and Sparta Science to create electronic stations that executed interactive combine tests for each participant.

The results for the Gatorade combine tests provided accurate information for consumers, giving them data and knowledge to apply to other areas of life whether it be workout routines or dieting. Experiential marketing proves extremely impactful to consumers when it not only offers entertainment but also valuable information.

Red Bull- Stratos

The whole world held its breath when Redbull performed a record-breaking, supersonic skydiving jump. Known for its bold actions and involvement in extreme sports, Redbull decided to take its marketing strategy to new heights – – 24 miles about the earth’s surface to be exact! Redbull developed an experiential marketing campaign known as “Stratos” and partnered with Felix Baumgartner, a skydiver from Austria, to accomplish this incredible stunt.

Redbull streamed this event on YouTube and received over 8 million views (the highest viewing traffic of any live stream broadcasted on Youtube!) Don’t be afraid to think big and push the limits with your marketing strategies. Leave a lasting impression on your consumers by using the power of suspense and giving your audience something new to experience.

Categories
Business Digital Marketing

Boost Your Sales During the Holiday Season

The holiday season from November to the end of December is the most lucrative time of year for retailers. Is your business ready for the shopping frenzy? With the holidays quickly approaching, now is the time to formulate your marketing strategies to attract customers and generate those sales! Check out these marketing tips below to see how your business can maximize its sales during the holiday season.

Make Your Cyber 5 Strategy Part of a Bigger Game Plan

Those extremely important shopping days from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday are referred to as the “Cyber 5”. A common misconception is to get your ad campaigns up and running just in time for Black Friday. While it is crucial to recognize the Cyber 5 as huge shopping days, implementing a more comprehensive advertising approach will result in a more consistent and effective campaign. In 2018, marketers devoted 19% of their search budgets to Cyber 5 spending, but those days make up for just 9% of holiday shopping. This year, more businesses are looking to adopt a strategy that encompasses the Cyber 5 as well as the whole extended holiday season. This results in catching the attention of both the October early-bird shoppers and the last minute shoppers.

Optimize for Mobile Use

A growing number of consumers are visiting websites from mobile devices.
Your business must be optimized for mobile use if you want customers to find your store and stay to shop. A responsive web design is crucial for grabbing the attention of consumers and will result in greater engagement and higher sales numbers. The National Retail Federation projects 105 billion in online sales this holiday season with an estimated 127 million shoppers predicted to shop on Cyber Monday. Of these Cyber Monday shoppers, 25 million said they would specifically use their mobile devices for purchases.

Take Advantage of In-Channel Buying

Consumers are more connected than ever before. A recent study found that 64% of customers are using multiple channels to complete a single transaction. This translates to many touchpoint across numerous different platforms. In 2018, holiday traffic to digital sites from social media channels grew by 22% year over year. This year, even more shoppers are expected to be buying in-channel. This means that retailers should be ready to push their brand where the consumers already are, such as social media platforms.

Royal Highnies’ Holiday Success

Royal Highnies is a growing luxury loungewear and undergarment retailer. From boxer shorts to lounge pants, to tee shirts and more, Royal Highnies provides ultimate comfort for the whole family.

During the 2017 holiday season, Royal Highnies wanted to boost its online advertising in order to attract more consumers to the brand. This is where Spectruss came in. Our team worked with Royal Highnies to implement digital marketing strategies that would result in a huge ROI.

First, we conducted detailed market research to identify a specific target market for Royal Hignies. Based off this audience, we did rigorous keyword research to ensure their brand would be seen by the right consumers.

Once we defined a specific customer base, we developed a digital marketing plan that included creative email campaigns, shopping ad campaigns, display ads, social media ad campaigns and fresh graphics.

This campaign utilized new approaches and creative materials designed specifically to reach Royal Highnies’ target market. The end result? Royal Highnies saw a 25% increase in online sales and a 10% increase in wholesale sales.

Categories
Marketing

8 Tips for Better Business Branding Online

Check out some helpful tips for better business branding online. While some may seem more intuitive than others, remembering and refreshing on helpful tips could spark a new idea!

Create a Visual

People like to look at visuals over long bodies of text. Create visuals for your business to get people attention online with eye-catching colors, a logo, interesting photography, etc. When on social media platforms, pictures carry much farther than text and can get to a wider reach of people. Make sure to not only set up pictures for your business but to regularly update them with new visuals to keep people interested. As time goes on, people may get concerned if the visual content has not been updated over time and wonder if you’re still open.

Be on Social Media

Why for some people social media is second nature, for others it is not. If you haven’t joined a few social media channels for your business, consider starting that today! Social media is a great way to let people know about your business without even asking you any questions over the phone or stepping into your store/office. The top platforms to start on are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Consistency

If you decided to start sending out weekly emails, monthly parties, daily blogs, etc., keep it consistent. Try your best to keep up a maintainable schedule of consistency in what you do. While this can be helpful for yourself, in that it keeps new content and events coming regularly, it can also keep others thinking about your business. If they come to expect to see new content from you every week, they are thinking about you every week.

Don’t Please Everyone

It can be extremely tough to please everyone online. Some people are unpleasable. This is something you must remember. With social media being a way that people can voice their opinion without showing their face, this has led some people to be completely unpleasable. Handel situations calmly if there is a problem. Remember the type of voice you want your company to have and use it. If a comment or rating is upsetting, see if there is a way to resolve it without changing a positive persona.

Reach out to your Community

Consider ways you can stand out in your community. Join in local events in your city or post regular helpful tips on the web, there are many ways to get involved. Look for ways for people to keep you in their thoughts. When you reach out to your community, your reach out to all their friends and family who could also be potential customers in the future.

Be Trendy

Consider if your company actions are too dated for the present face of your brand. Is it time to switch to email questions over phone calls? Could people get digital, paperless coupons over physical ones? While every company is different, it might be time to look at what the kids are doing these days and see if you can jump into some of the latest trends.

Know who your Selling To

If your customer base is mainly people in their 50’s and 60’s, you may not be needing to create content for teenagers and young adults. Find out who your target audience is and what their trends are. While teens might be more likely to get online at noon during school lunch, an adult may not be online to see your new content till 6:30 after a long work day.

Share Information and Knowledge

Keeping the business secret recipe can keep you above your competition, but that doesn’t mean you can’t help with some of the small things. Use your knowledge and share tips and advice among the community to show just how much you know and why people should be interested. This can help make you look more reputable and knowledgeable.

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