Written by: Annalise Maniscalco, Certified Social Media Marketer Experiential Marketing is a strategy that focuses on engaging the consumer through branded experiences with the goal of generating positive associations for the brand. Why is this important? Effective experiential marketing strategies help your clients form memorable, emotional connections to your brand that foster loyalty, reduce customer…
How to Use Experiential Marketing in the AEC Industry
Written by: Annalise Maniscalco, Certified Social Media Marketer
Experiential Marketing is a strategy that focuses on engaging the consumer through branded experiences with the goal of generating positive associations for the brand. Why is this important? Effective experiential marketing strategies help your clients form memorable, emotional connections to your brand that foster loyalty, reduce customer acquisition costs, and improve client experience. Put simply, successful campaigns will decrease client turnover (and the associated costs) and increase value provided to your organization and audience.
But how can you use it to grow business? You may be thinking experiential marketing must take place in a physical setting, but that’s a common misconception. While experiential marketing and event marketing are closely related, experiential marketing can take place anywhere your brand has a touchpoint with your audience. Although this is no new concept, we are seeing more and more brands integrate experiential marketing into their digital strategies, thanks to the acceleration of digital transformation and the experience economy. Yes, even in the AEC industry. Nonetheless, experiential marketing can be comprised of any variety of marketing tactics aimed toward engaging consumers in your brand (e.g., video; polls; virtual reality; gift boxes; invites; QR codes; website interaction; project communications and more). You may be surprised to learn that if you are participating in the following channels, you’re likely already participating in experiential marketing – for better or worse.
In the AEC industry, we tend to be intimidated by new marketing tactics. I’m here to tell you, it does not have to be complicated or time consuming. You can do it! We have successfully integrated branded experiences into our B2B marketing strategies, and you can too! If you’re still feeling trepidation, check out some of our experiential marketing initiatives below.
Delight Your Audience
Community Pulse is a podcast where we uncover the hard-hitting insights that drive our economy, organizations and communities forward. As we highlight the transformations happening in our communities, we invite the leaders making them happen to share their unique insights with our audience. This channel allows us to share valuable information while building relationships with our community leaders. On the flip side of that coin, we want our guests to get that same value. As such, we send a follow-up swag bag including a book on thought leadership and refrigerator magnets linking our guests’ directly to their podcast episode; this way, they can easily share their episode with their friends, partners and audience.
Leverage Interactive Media
We’ve experienced an immense shift in the way we live, function and connect. As we aim to be at the forefront of how our communities thrive in the face of disruption, we invited our clients and partners to join the conversation. We set up video kiosks exploring each of our innovation platforms at our Annual Open House and asked participants to drive the conversation. Through their input, we provide valuable learning opportunities and ensure our clients and partners remain at the heart of our business plan.
Promote your brand digitally
It comes as no surprise that we love social media . With 56.8% of the world’s population on social media, it’s easy to see why the popularity of this channel is growing amongst marketers and business development leaders. Social media allows us to showcase the personality of our brand and engage in meaningful conversations with our audience. Leveraging experiential marketing on our social media platforms allowed us to grow our website audience by 340% in five months! Remember, experiential marketing is all about getting your audience to directly engage with your brand. You can do this by simply commenting on posts, asking for input, sharing articles; the options are endless!
Experiential marketing doesn’t have to be complicated. Pick a channel that works best for your organization and give it a try! I’ll leave you with this tip; no matter how you choose to engage in experiential marketing, a successful tactic will:
Include active engagement from audience
Provide value
Echo your brand mission and values
If you want to learn more about how experiential marketing can help grow your business, please don’t hesitate to contact me at AManiscalco@envdesigngroup.com. In the meantime, follow us on social media for more tips and tricks on growing your organization through marketing!
