How Is Experiential Marketing Different From Event Marketing?

Event marketing has been used as a marketing strategy by companies for over a decade. However, as technology and the world continues to evolve, so do consumer expectations.

Experiential marketing is a relatively new strategy marketers have developed in order to directly interact with the consumer through two-way communication. Despite their similarities, event and experiential marketing have different end goals. Both can be used together, but the biggest difference between the two is the way in which they engage the target consumer.

What Is Event Marketing?

Event marketing is a form of one-way communication between the brand and consumer. The brand has the ability to speak directly to the consumer about the brand, product, or service being shared.

Event marketing strategies are effective because the company is able to completely control the narrative and pinpoint the exact message they want to share with the consumer, with little room for miscommunication.

Through event marketing, companies are able to get information into the hands of consumers directly. It also is an effective way to reach a specific target audience, which can yield better results and ultimately lead to sales.

Examples of Event Marketing

Event marketing is a marketing tactic often used when marketers want to announce or sell new products and create excitement around the brand in the media. This type of event is great way to quickly generate conversations, without a large amount of money needed to create the event.

While brands are still trying to create positive brand associations for the consumer, their main goal is to get out the message that their brand has something new to offer. A vital part of the business model is customer feedback, and while event marketing is an efficient way to spread a message, one of its downsides is that it doesn’t allow for open communication between the company and consumer.

Since event marketing is only one-way communication, the consumer has to receive the business’s message without the ability to share their thoughts or experience back. This lack of two-way communication can cause event marketing to be a less memorable (and less effective) form of marketing experience to the consumer.

If a company has ever passed out a brochure to you during a live event such as a music festival or you’ve sat in on a conference or lunch and learn, you’ve experienced event marketing. This is a strong strategy for companies because they are able to increase brand and product exposure to a large audience in a short amount of time.

What is Experiential Marketing?

Experiential marketing is often used as a strategy to get consumer’s attention to a brand, product, or service and allow for more open communication. Experiential marketing aims to bring brand awareness, offer a way to let consumers try products, expand cross channel efforts, create brand loyalty, and increase lead generation.

The main goals of experiential marketing are to create positive brand associations for the consumer and generate positive conversations about the brand.

A solid experiential marketing strategy should always encourage participation from the consumer and give the consumer the opportunity to give the company feedback. Experiential marketing events should be engaging, educating, and unique immersive experiences. The consumer should walk away from the event with a lasting impression, and hopefully new knowledge of your brand. Good experiential marketing always engages the consumers’ five senses and should create a lasting emotional connection.

Experiential Marketing Increases Your Reach

Since consumers are more immersed in experiential marketing, they are more likely to share their unique experience on social media as well. This is a great result of experiential marketing because it allows for even more people to see the message your company is sharing and can create impressions on a much larger audience than just those invited to the event.

Experiential event experiences can be streamed or offered online in some fashion, bringing the live experience to those who aren’t there in real-life. While virtual attendees may not walk away with as much of a personalized experience, you can foster a social media conversation through hashtags, or even leverage brand ambassadors to share their experiences online with their followers.

When consumers share their experiences on social media, it creates an authentic conversation and operates as a form of word of mouth marketing. Sharing their experiences with their followers is essentially a free form of marketing for your company, as you are getting even more out of the expenses you spent on creating the customer experience and possibly reaching thousands of more people.

When a consumer shares a positive brand experience with their friends on social media, they are also cultivating brand loyalty and authenticity. A happy consumer is one that will most likely come back to your brand again and tell their friends about it as well. In today’s age, authenticity is everything, and consumers want to find brands they can be loyal to that match their values.

Examples of Experiential Marketing

There are many different routes a business can take when creating an experiential marketing campaign. In the past, brands have organized events such as augmented reality, virtual reality and metaverse experiences, pop-up shops, product demos, product sampling and more. As the world begins to shift to WEB3 it is expected that brands will begin offering even more augmented reality experiences at their events.

The pandemic also showed us that experiential marketing events do not just have to be in person. With the restrictions that came with the pandemic, many companies began looking to virtual events as a way to still reach consumers in a unique, engaging way. Virtual events, one of the types of experiential marketing, are not able to appeal to the five senses in consumers as easily, but they can still help foster a positive and lasting brand impression for the consumer.

Furthermore, virtual experiential marketing events allow brands to reach consumers from anywhere in the world. This is a huge advantage because brands are no longer limited to just holding events in specific locations like New York City, allowing them to be more inclusive to people such as those in rural areas.

An example of a product sampling experiential marketing event could be offering a tasting menu at the opening of a new restaurant along with note cards for guests to rank each dish. Not only does this allow for feedback from the consumer, but also allows the consumer to feel like they are a part of the business’s long term goals.

Memorable experiences like these can emotionally bond the consumer to the business, as the consumer feels like a part of the company’s success. This helps create more personable connections between the company and consumer, and can help generate organic future business for the company.

Event Marketing and Experiential Marketing Go Hand In Hand

Event and experiential marketing strategies certainly overlap, aiming to share new products, services, or opportunities with a consumer base. However, the end goals of both marketing tactics do differ—event marketing wants to bring attention to their brand in the media, sparking heightened short-term interest, while experiential marketing wants to bring a unique experience to a consumer and foster a long-term emotional connection to drive sales.

If you want to host a live marketing event for your company, get in touch with a top-rated event marketing agency that specializes in engagement marketing and event planning to bring your brand to the next level.