If you're a business owner, marketing director, or a decision-maker in a business, this may be the most important post you read today. M2W Inc, an industry leader in...
Holidays ring in marketing and promotional opportunities for various organizations throughout the calendar year. However, you shouldn't limit your marketing efforts to flyers, direct mail, and other standard marketing techniques. If you do, you'll miss out on the holidays' unique opportunities to bring people together face-to-face. Instead, make experiential marketing a significant part of your holiday marketing plans.
The right experiential marketing tactics can help your brand interact with your target audience more directly and vividly than ever. Here are six holiday marketing ideas you can put to good use:
Image source: https://cdn.pixabay.com/photo/2017/11/23/03/17/christmas-2971961_1280.jpg
Tactic #1: Conduct a Seasonal Brand Tour
Brand tours take your show on the road. These company tours involve creating, transporting, setting up, and fulfilling branded events across multiple cities. Event activation companies typically plan these events to line up with seasonal activities such as festivals, vacations, and holiday celebrations.
You'll want to put this tactic into play as far ahead of the holiday as possible. Brand tours require the management of complex physical logistics, from securing general permits and venue reservations to engaging the necessary event staff. They also require you to spread the word through public relations campaigns and influencers. However, a holiday for which your potential buyers typically enjoy time off and participate in public celebrations can help you attract the largest possible crowd.
Tactic #2: Host a Holiday Food or Beverage Sampling
When you think of holiday attractions, you most likely envision tempting foods and beverages associated with that particular holiday. Your target audience probably does the same, so if you sell food or drink items, the holiday is an ideal opportunity to introduce them to those products. Imagine their positive response when you bring sampling events to participating offices, shops, and residential areas.
Nothing sells a delicious product or the brand behind it like an actual tasting. Add music, contests, and special offers to create an onsite event that will tickle tastebuds as it boosts your brand profile.
photo courtesy: M2W INC brand ambassadors
Tactic #3: Plan In-Store Holiday Events
Visitors to all kinds of stores during the holidays can expect to encounter numerous holiday promotions. Do you maintain multiple stores across the U.S. or around the world? Then you have the perfect opportunity to make a positive impact—one that raises your brand visibility, gets shoppers excited, and turns browsers into buyers. A marketing activation agency can help you devise franchise-wide, in-store holiday events that feature the products or services you sell.
This widespread experiential marketing extravaganza can make you stand out even in the hectic world of in-store holiday promotions. For instance, if you specialize in bedding, you could promote a "musical beds" event in which prospective customers lie on different mattresses in the manner of a "musical chairs" game, with winners qualifying for a free mattress. At the same time, you can give out coupons for merchandise or enter participants in a contest to win other fabulous prizes.
Tactic #4: Time Your Grand Opening for the Holidays
Whether you plan a grand opening for your first store or an entire cluster, you want to give local consumers every chance to immerse themselves in the experience. A grand opening timed in sync with a holiday ensures that your target audience will have the time and opportunity to participate in your event.
An experiential marketing campaign for a grand opening can take advantage of the festive nature of the holiday season by turning it into a party, complete with music, local celebrities, free refreshments, and games that offer prizes to the winners. If you need to introduce your products to a puzzled crowd, set up a series of demonstrations that include hands-on or show-and-tell experiences.
photo courtesy: M2W INC brand ambassadors
Tactic #5: Give Back Through Seasonal Charitable Events
In addition to focusing people's attention on the good things in their lives, the holidays can also prompt them to think about others in need. You can align your brand with these sentiments, express your brand's values, and help less fortunate individuals by hosting seasonal charity drives or other charitable events. Experiential marketing can do wonders for these cause marketing efforts because of its emphasis on emotion-based communication and personal connection.
Think of the ways that your brand could represent itself as a compassionate voice at a holiday-themed charitable event. For instance, if your business involves communications technologies, you might set up kiosks that enable visitors to use your technologies to submit donations to a worthy cause. In return, you might offer discounts on future purchases or hand out raffle tickets to participating donors, using one of your flagship products as the grand prize. You may also need to match the event type to your target market's interests, such as a charity golf tournament for a golf-loving demographic.
Tactic #6: Make a Personalized Splash at a Holiday Trade Show
Trade shows and expos abound annually as organizations related to a particular industry, field, or interest reserve booths, hang banners, and promote themselves. Specific holidays provide an especially relevant backdrop for businesses promoting everything from brilliant gift ideas to holiday-themed products and services. However, you may have trouble attracting attention to your brand in these crowded, noisy environments—unless you have something unique to offer the visitors who come to your booth. Experiential marketing could make all the difference.
The longer you keep your visitors engaged, the more profound an impact you'll make, and the more effectively you can collect essential marketing data. Hands-on demonstrations, interactive games, and contest entries can hold your visitors' attention as they also encourage them to hand over that data. A marketing activation agency could even help you offer innovative DIY promotional products such as T-shirts, buttons, or bumper stickers that visitors can create for themselves through interactive technologies.
We Can Put These Tactics to Work for You
As the above tactics indicate, you have multiple options for putting the magic of experiential marketing to work for your organization during the holidays. Instead of struggling to create an integrated, comprehensive experiential marketing plan, you can place this task in the hands of an experienced brand activation agency.
Contact The Experiential Network today to schedule a no-obligation consultation. We'll explain more about how event activation companies work and what we can do to make your holiday especially merry.
