B2B Experiential Marketing – When does it work?
What is experiential marketing? On the rise in recent years, door2door Marketing agent in pune and experiential marketing is all about customer interaction with your brand. It offers a unique experience with products or services, allowing customers to get a feel for how they would use it in their lives.
For years marketers have been trying to get customers to use and trial their products. In this way it’s not a new concept; there have however, certainly been some innovative spins on how it’s done. Let’s look at experiential marketing, how it can work for B2Bs and some of the ways it can help build your brand.
Emotional + Experiential Branding = Experiential Marketing The two elements that underpin experiential marketing are emotional branding and experiential branding.
Emotional branding: is about building the relationship between your brand and customers. Promoting emotional benefits like brand trust, security and credibility as a result of engaging with your brand is crucial.
Experiential branding: designs and creates interactions that are sensory in nature, which emotionally influences preferences, shaping brand perception, and influencing satisfaction and loyalty.
An excellent experiential marketing campaign is able to fuse both elements seamlessly together.
Experiential Marketing for B2Bs In recent years interest in B2B experiential marketing has grown and some of the initial hesitation surrounding it has been replaced with a working understanding, when to do it, and how it stimulates ROI.
For B2Bs, experiential marketing is generally less obvious, with the focus often on services (for example) in place of B2C exciting product launches. Oftentimes the B2B budget is also stretched. However we are seeing marketers begin to recognise the potentials that the experience can offer consumers.
“The success of brand experience within the B2C market has not gone unnoticed, and B2B marketers are waking up to the potential of brand experience. However, there is a long way to go before they catch up with their B2C counterparts.” – Graham Ede, Ion Group
3 Examples of B2B experiential marketing Location with B2Bs can be one of the major barriers, and while it may not be easy to do experiential marketing in quite the same way as B2C, there’s certainly room to employ some of the same principals. Creating sensory interactions that promote core feelings of trust, and awareness of your product or services is central to this.
Fulcrum marketing in public spaces – Linked with experiential, some marketers use a form of Fulcrum marketing. They tend to hold this drive in places where there are high concentrations of business buyers. Branded promotional staff can offer business people the opportunity to enter in a promotion, or sign up to attend an event whilst promoting the benefits of the product.
demonstrations & reward – as part of a targeted marketing strategy, those in the IT space can offer information via webinar or video, which can showcase some aspects of the technology solution. Some marketing and web-based tools such as offer a free trial period, together with online coaching via Skype. This allows the user to build confidence in using the tool, and to experience all of the benefits of the trial period. At the end of the trial period (7 days), the participant is given a report with feedback on how well they have used the tool. Then they are awarded a certificate.
Surprises and games – Surprising customers by showing up where they least expect you, gifting them, or sending them a card is a way to provide an out of the box experience and drive brand awareness. Another option could be to exhibit at a partner’s event as IBM did. Their interactive stand came complete with a candy bar, and plasma screens which posted live tweets from event attendees. Digital technology such as apps and games are also opportunity areas, and while often costly, look set to become more widespread and affordable in future.
Experiential marketing reflects the growing importance of emphasising emotions to build successful brands. Digital media offers expanding opportunities to offer such experiences.
In the ever-competitive B2B marketplace, it’s no longer enough to rely on traditional modes for lead generation. B2B marketers need to consider the complete kit that is available to them including; social media, mobile, search, paid advertising, print, telemarketing and increasingly placing emotion at the heart of it all with an experiential approach.
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What is ‘Brand Identity’
A company’s brand identity is how that business wants to be perceived by consumers. The components of the brand (name, logo, tone, tagline, typeface) are created by the business to reflect the value the company is trying to bring to the market and to appeal to its customers. Brand identity is separate from brand image – the term for how consumers actually perceive the brand.
BREAKING DOWN ‘Brand Identity’
Most miscommunication in daily life can be chalked up to an mismatch between intent and perception: You think you said one thing, the person you talked to thought you said something else. Companies often have the same problem.
In the context of business and branding, a company’s brand identity is what it says about who it is – the product or service it delivers, the quality it gives customers, its advantages over competing brands. The brand image, on the other hand, is how the brand is perceived by the public. The challenge any company faces when trying to build a brand is to make sure that its identity matches its image as closely as possible. A negative gap between brand identity and brand image means a company is out of touch with market sentiment, which can make offering services or products more difficult and can even result in a loss of value on the company’s books.
Building Brand Identity
The steps a company needs to take to build a strong, cohesive and consistent brand identity will vary, but a few points apply broadly to most:
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Analyze itself and its market. A full SWOT analysis – a look at the company’s strength’s, weaknesses, opportunities and threats – that includes the entire company is a proven way to help a company’s managers understand where they’re at so they can better determine where they’d like to end up and how to get there.
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Determine its key business goals. The brand identity should help fulfill them.
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Identify its customers. Who is the company trying to reach with its products/services?
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Determine the personality and message it wants to communicate. What does the company want its market to perceive?
Building a brand identity is a multi-disciplinary, strategic effort; every element needs to support the overall message and business goals. It can includes a company’s name, logo, design; its style and the tone of its copy; the look and composition of its products; and, of course, its social media presence. It’s common for companies to hire a creative team to handle its branding.
Real-World Examples of Brand Identity
A well-built brand identity will effectively communicate a company’s personality and its product value to potential customers, helping build brand recognition, association and loyalty.
If you asked people on the street what Bose Corporation sells, they’d most likely tell you headphones. And that is indeed one of the company’s major product lines.
On its face, getting your market to know who you are and what you sell may seem a simple task, but it’s critical to gaining an advantage. While awareness can be critical to the success of a company, it’s important that the kind of awareness is associated with something positive.
The messages companies try to communicate are rarely complicated, but making them effective requires ensuring that all the elements of a company’s brand identity work cohesively. Successful brands such as Coca-Cola Co., Nike Inc., Starbucks Corp. and Apple Inc. have achieved this difficult task. What may come to mind when you think of these brands are, respectively, “refreshing,” “fast,” “morning coffee” and “sleek.” Getting that kind of strong and positive brand association can help make a company and its product “top of mind” to its customers.
Building brand loyalty can bring in consistent sales and make product roll-outs more successful. An example of the benefits of brand loyalty could be seen in the introduction of two new
subscription-based music streaming services in 2015. Tidal and Apple Music had to make very different choices in the marketing and rollout of their services because of brand loyalty. Apple, an established brand with very loyal customers, didn’t have to invest in the type of celebrity-oriented marketing that Tidal used in order to promote its new service.
Brand Value
A company’s brand is usually considered one of the most valuable assets on a company’s balance sheet. Giving that brand a monetary value is, among other things, a metric that can help brand managers better understand their performance as stewards of the company’s name and the goodwill a positively associated brand can buy the company. There are various ways that a monetary value can be placed on a brand, including the cost it would take to build a similar brand, analyzing cost of royalties to use brand name, and cash flow of comparative unbranded businesses.
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