Experiential marketing Vs Digital Marketing

Marketing’s magnetism isn’t just about creating a stunning web presentation for weekends or a daily dose of motivation via stories. We are at a time when your followers aren’t just passive receptors of information but a crucial part of the brand. And, the digital space is elevating the need for brands to shift from information providers to creating physical experiences!

Experiential marketing is a wing of marketing that empowers the brand through customer engagement, brand connection, affluence and more. While the two power worlds viz. digital and experiential marketing, often collide to create brand image and awareness, they indeed are very different.

What is experiential marketing?

Often revered as ‘live marketing’, ‘ground marketing’, ‘event marketing’ and ‘engagement marketing’, – Experiential marketing is a marketing strategy that engages the consumers and creates a real-time experience of the brand for them.

Think of it as a restaurant where you are allowed to taste bite-sized food before you order your meal. So you walk into the restaurant and instead of just reading through a menu that blandly lists down the options, you actually sense the smell, savour the taste, and know exactly what you are ordering. Experiential marketing opens up doors for consumers to communicate with the brand, sample products, sense the experience, and trust the brand before they actually buy the products.

The wax and wane of Experiential Marketing

Experiential marketing creates a direct interaction between the brand and the customers. But while it rewards the brand with goodwill, customer-connect, and strong influence, it comes with its downside too. Experiential marketing, like any other marketing technique, can fail to make an impact if the audience is not right. So when a beauty brand sends you free samples of products when you participate in an Instagram contest, it is also challenged by increased costs and risking defamatory reactions from the audience at large.

Experiential marketing indeed comes with an advantage to make the brand stand out with:

• Creative positioning of the brand
• The attention of media and influencers
• Social media exposure
• Reliability
• Emotional and contextual relevance
• Memorability etc.

But some disadvantages like budget limitations, the uncertainty of outcomes, execution failure, risk of failed expectations, etc are likely to influence the brand’s prowess.

Digital Marketing fills in the gaps of experiential marketing!

Integrating digital marketing into experiential marketing is likely to provide the greatest ROI for the brands. As you create an experiential marketing campaign, through digital marketing you can create a social media hub with influencers, artists, and customers with louder advocacy of the brand which increases the campaign’s ROI and decreases the cost per touch. Be it about encouraging the customers to share their brand story on social media like their favourite influencers, or covering an event through digital platforms for wider reach – digital marketing can give a big boost to brand image and its position in the market!

Digital marketing aids cost-friendly promotions to capture audience reaction before the campaign runs on the floor, and filters the audience for relatable experiences. A brand’s risk of opening up its products for customer judgment is soon converted into positive influence, emotionally connect and budgetary benefits through digital marketing techniques.

The unsurpassable duo

Experiential Marketing and Digital Marketing are inseparable today and their metaphoric Venn diagrams are quite overlapping too. While being uniquely effective for brands in their individual demeanours, the two techniques go hand in hand. From announcing brand launch party on social media to race up the excitement, creating unique hashtags for promotions, etc. to sharing customer experiences, reviews, after event pictures – digital marketing creates waves of glory for a brand’s experiential marketing campaign. The synergy of experiential and digital marketing brings in strong social influence, global engagement, positive charisma and of course greener analytics for the brand.

Experiential marketing is a hint of sensory experience in the world of digitalization. Integrating it with digital marketing isn’t just groundbreaking for brand image, but increasingly becoming the new norm. At All Stars Digital, our experts draft new customer experiences, strategize campaigns, and create effective channels for brands to boost customer engagement, stand out from the crowd and enjoy the limelight!