“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” – Steve Jobs.
Famous quotes like this one leave a lasting impression on our mind. The reason why such contents strike us hard is because we somewhere, somehow relate to what the content conveys and expresses.
An experiential campaign is no different, it aims to create an experience and connect with its target consumers who get some takeaway from it. If the campaign achieves its intended goal to create a brand or product experience with consumers, which they can relate to or that which evokes positive emotions. It is very likely that the brand recall will be more often and consumers will go through positive emotions associating with the brand or its product.
If we simply study our lives, we constantly go through events that primarily dominate how we think, feel, do, interact with etc. These events consists of moments, memories and experiences. Most of our engagements happen over the TV with films, serials and textual contents like newspapers, books etc. And then there are some contents from one of these forms, which will stand out and we tend to remember them longer. These longstanding contents leave a mark on us and are very powerful.
These days, if we talk about content, the first thing that comes to any marketer’s mind is social media. And, the most outrageously overused expression in the social media domain with respect to content is – ‘Content is King’. A king may be really worthy of praise and valour, but that may only as good as a regional folklore if the word about him doesn’t even get beyond his kingdom. Similarly, experiential marketing may create positive connect with selective audiences at a mall or an event, but the number of people getting impacted directly, first hand with the engagement is not even a fraction compared to the population of a city. It is the social media that propagates and propound such experiential engagements to millions of users who are sitting online and consuming digital data every minute.
An experiential activity may be limited geographically, demographically but through social media, it can be brought to huge number of people at once, which helps in advertising and promoting the effort, which in turn can lead many to the brand that is doing the marketing activity. Social media may not alone bring the entire gamut of experiential element to a brand’s campaign but it certainly acts as an amplifier as well as a supporting experiential add on.
Although there have been online engagement activities that have been conducted entirely using social media, but it is the content that always makes it interesting, creating an instant connect with the users.
So, can good content alone fill for a mediocre on-ground experiential activity?
No, it will not. A great experiential activity that evokes positive emotions will encourage people to happily contribute online on its own. Such initiatives will create enough buzz that they would want to generate great content for an upcoming event as well as after the event. Either ways, content is created that cuts through the complex web of information out there online and when personally shared by users with their friends, they tend to get more notices.
So all in all, it is important for brands to not just run and complete a great campaign offline, but create enough excitement around it online using good content, which has the power to cause a chain reaction where consumers go on creating content for the brand on their own while engaging and sharing about the campaign, which they just experienced or are anticipating for.
The experiential marketing initiatives and great content will always go hand in hand.
