Top Ten Tips For Experiential Marketing Integration
Posted on Wed, Jul 14, 2010
Follow our top ten tips from our June 23rd “Event Marketer” Webinar with Disney Park’s Promotions Manager, Alex Ruiz, to successfully develop and launch a fully integrated experiential campaign. These tips were developed to help your program run much smoother with fewer unexpected problems. Always remember, with programs that have so many moving parts, there will be hurdles, challenges and obstacles along the way but if you’re properly prepared they will be smaller and less significant.
- Integrate early and integrate often
As with other marketing integration programs, moving parts abound when integrating experiential marketing with print, media, internet/technology and face-to-face. Begin the integration planning process as early as possible and make sure the desired end-result or consumer behavior is first in the planning process. The more links you can create between media, data, technology and consumer live-interaction the better success the program will achieve.
- Strategic consistency from medium to medium
Task each marketing tactic to perform where it is at it’s best. Know the primary value proposition for each medium and plan how you want them to integrate with each other. The overarching strategy will inform each medium to perform and drive the desired results they were intended to deliver. It’s also important resist placing too much load on any one tactic – share the burden of the program equally across all tactics.
- Creative integrity throughout
As with any marketing campaign, creative is the key to capturing the imagination of the target and owning share of mind. This is no truer than when experiential is integrated with both traditional and interactive media. By controlling the creative with consistency in color, design, image, theme and identity the integrity of the campaign becomes both familiar and impactful. If the payoff for your integrated program is delivered in the grocery aisle, it’s imperative that the POS and packaging are branded to align with all prior marketing activities that drove the consumer there in the first place. People are visual and take their purchase cue’s from their past experiences – link each of your marketing touches together from beginning to end.
- Message consistency
Every media has a unique methodology in which it communicates with or to the target. From a print headline in an ad to the scripting written for a street team, each media or activity should align with the same core-messaging platform. The same features and benefits, the same value proposition and the same tone must be adopted across all tactics within the integrated program.
The strength of the integrated program breaks down when messaging either dives too deep into one media or is not as deep as is required leaving the target confused and/or uninterested because of unclear unrelated information.
- Open up cross-discipline communication
This may be the most critical piece of advice to achieve success when creating and integrated experiential program. The hallmark of a well-crafted program features clear lines of open communications between internal departments on both the brand side and the various contributors on the agencies side.
Representatives from all internal disciplines of the brand-side should be notified about the plan and brought in to the planning cycle early. Give them ownership in making their part of the process function and let each representative know who and when they have hand-offs and interactions with.
On the agency side of the equation clearly define the ownership rolls and lead contacts for each piece of the process. Create a contact list for each member of the integration team and provide a platform for open communications. Every agency has experience in related operations that are one or two generations away from their core area of expertise. Allow them to have input but own the final decision based on the strategy.
- Map the complete process and experience
This may sound basic, but map out each step of the targets experience, in detail, to ensure all elements of the integrated plan work with each other. What do they see or engage first? What is the desired step for each engagement? What happens when they engage the middle of the process? How is data captured at each step? How is the desired behavior rewarded? How is each engagement followed up? How does the program live on beyond the final planned engagement?
- Establish tracking and reporting benchmarks and performance
Define all tracking and measurement metrics up front. The infrastructure of the program is dependent on the numbers and reporting processes that are established at the very beginning in the planning stages. Defining the infrastructure to support the reporting and the desired results will allow you to make modifications during the program.
Remember, that which gets tracked and measured, gets funded.
- Training-training-training
Take the time and properly invest in training for the field-marketing managers, brand ambassadors and logistics teams. While a headline can be crafted, edited and re-written, the people who are engaging the consumer are answering questions and must be highly credible. Remember, they are out there on the street, meeting face-to-face with potential customers, consumers and partners of your brand. For that program, they are your brand and should be competent, credible and engaging. Think of the consumer engagement as a live-ad.
- Commit to the whole process
With some marketing initiatives it is possible to shut pieces of a program down without any real negative impact on the overall program and brand. However, when an integrated experiential program is marketed and launched, all related follow through that touches on the ground are critical. Integrated media are pointing to the ground experience which points to the web which informs the PR, etc., etc. The big payoff to an integrated program is engaging face-to-face with the target, it knocks down the last barrier and influences the desired behavior. We are all human and it’s human interaction that has the most profound influence on any behavior.
- Look for experience
Choose partners, agencies, resources and internal influencers carefully. Chose people who believe in and understand the value of face-to-face marketing and how it positively influences the behavior of people. The most well conceived integrated program could fall apart quickly when a key decision maker is uninformed or worse, not experienced with integrated face-to-face programs. Make sure you handpick a high-level advocate, in advance, to “soften the beaches” among the decision makers. This will make sell-in and commitment the first hurdles easy to overcome. When engaging agencies, check their references, confirm testimonials and ask specifics about the programs – you can learn a lot about an agency by talking to their clients. This is essential to know that they can deliver and are the right partner for you, your brand and your organization.
Pro Motion is a St. Louis-based experiential marketing agency that brings brands to life via face-to-face sampling, guerrilla marketing, sponsorship activation, mobile vehicle tours and stunts. Our programs increase the impact of branding, marketing and public relations initiatives by engaging consumers directly, converting tryers into buyers. For more information, visit www.promotion1.com or follow Pro Motion on Facebook or Twitter.