How to Find a Good Experiential Marketing Agency?

Experiential market activation is filling the present time’s marketing event arena. Experiential marketing concentrates on creating a real-life experience for its audiences.

It even supports the evolving need to bring in the customers or audiences through a very meaningful life experience, which will deepen the relationship between brand and customer.

One such most essential advantage of experiential marketing refers to the lasting impression & sense of brand loyalty that it creates among the target audiences.

Experiential marketing might appear a lot similar to event marketing, which is certainly not a surprise as experiential campaigns & strategies are basically event-centric.

However, such live occasions tend to include more than just event planning, execution, & event management.

They lean at providing an immersive live experience & are generally standalone i.e not a part of bigger happenings such as trade fairs, product launches, music festivals, mobile tours or any other kind of corporate event.

When it is about event marketing agencies, an event marketer can easily pull off any event you look for as they will be on a routine project plan with concerned people for it.

These are such resources that an experiential marketing company that specialises in corporate events & event production should also have with the distinction that they approach every occasion like their first event.

Ensure to conduct your due diligence

You have conducted your research & found few experiential marketing companies that appear like a nice fit concerning your brand. However, before you get along with them, you must do your background check.

Discuss with your colleagues & with the agency’s other clients, conduct thorough research regarding them both online & offline & then schedule for a meetup.

Search for how long the marketing agency was into this business. Ask regarding the corporate culture & review their current & past work.

Review their portfolio & ask to view examples of their experiential marketing campaign & how they have assisted other clients to enhance brand awareness.

Is the experiential marketing agency very big or very small? Know the number of staff/employees they have? Will you get access to all? What are the procedures they actually use for delivering what the customer requires? Knowing all of it gives you the right confidence that they may be the correct experiential agency for you.

Contact those agencies with good experience in industries with almost the same targets

Opting for the agency with zero experience in your particular industry/industries with the same targets means that you will require providing the training on basic regulations, environment & nuances.

This can be extremely time-consuming & costly & ultimately you will not be very sure whether the company will be able to manage the entire project easily and successfully.

Thus, benchmarking the top class practices from various other companies/industries are very beneficial. It will be wise to opt for an agency that efficiently has pulled off the same endeavours in the past & have learned a lot from the previous mistakes & experiences.

In case they have never designed or formulated a digital marketing tactic to reach the target same as yours, they might not have a similar level of expertise or commitment in experiential marketing.

Just ensure to factor in their core potentials – if you require a pop-up, sampling or a mobile tour activation & all you will view is a high profile concert & large festivals or merely digital experience in their portfolio, you must keep searching.

Get in touch with the team

The relationship between the client & the agency requires chemistry. Whether you closely work with the vice president or account service director of the agency, the relationship that you share should be very authentic.

Ensure you do not get handed to a staff who is entry-level for the ongoing support of the program. The live experience of the key contact helps in building direct relations for a successful program.

Experiential marketing agencies must be willing to know your national/global brand’s outlook on a deeper note for understanding your vision and mission.

They must acquire adequate insight into your brand to understand whether the experiential live event & campaign will work in your favour.

Thus, as a brand, you must schedule a get-together, visit the agency’s premises & meet the whole team. There can be nothing worse than having a dynamic team pitch you a particular offer, just to know that you did not get a good team working on the project.

Understand what your brand really requires?

Top experiential marketing companies at times can be thoroughly persuasive. Their salespeople & business may come up with revolutionary, innovative & never before carried out ideas that appear flashy & big.

However, do not get extremely excited about this as a specific idea is just good & carries the potential to change the marketing arena if it works in your favour.

Agency requires understanding who you actually are, what exact values you hold, how you should engage or communicate with the audiences & what you are trying to attain.

If they do not ask relevant questions, then all that they are putting on is just a flashy show. Assist the experiential agency to attain a clear picture regarding your brand authenticity just by sharing the customer’s experiences.

Importance of opting for integration

Choose an experiential marketing agency that understands the whole marketing system & how it easily drives the consumer approach, brand awareness & customer stories.

For integrating the branded experience, the correct way is to review which channels you utilize to estimate how other channels can efficiently support the experiential events.

Also, they will want to go through your ad copy to know your brand voice. Note that an integrated marketing stance drives better results.

In an overall marketing plan, the experiential marketing strategy must not be separated from the marketing endeavours like content marketing, social media marketing, public relations, & influencer marketing, even if it is specialized.

Discuss their strategy

Each event management company or marketing agency has their own specific way of implementing experiential campaigns. When your brand meets up to elaborately discuss the offers, ensure to figure out how they actually conduct market research, leverage consumer behaviour, approach event planning & production & avail data insight for developing experiential campaigns.

Many of the advertising & marketing agencies can provide turnkey services such as staffing or scheduling, but will they be able to recognise gaps in measurement or deliver beforehand?

In case it is not, they will fix you up with outcomes/results, which are not easy to calculate. Do they provide a customized approach? Do they consider your challenges & objectives?

How do they plan on packaging, record & amplify customer stories? A marketing strategy is based on a well-executed branded experience, & every experiential agency should have a specific process to, which they should stick by when tying up with a new brand.

Ensure to thoroughly evaluate their processes to understand if you agree with them.

Ask how do they measure or calculate success

Like with content marketing, social media marketing, influencer marketing or various other digital marketing forms, experiential marketing campaigns are fixed to deliver a good set of KPIs.

Before you choose an event management company or experiential marketing agency, ensure to see & agree with KPIs that they wish to track.

It should all the time be discussed up front as the campaign requires to get measures & monitored in terms of return on investment.

Thus, if your brand wants to interact with the target customers emotionally, what KPIs should the agency track? If you are looking to catalyze the word of mouth then how will the agency’s set campaign get audiences talking about you? And if you select on going with AR (Augmented Reality) or VR (Virtual Reality) experience then what will be the most crucial KPIs that they should track?

Which is the live marketing automatic system they depend on? Ask to view a sample of the experiential marketing report to understand what kind of data/info you would avail from the campaign & how they would assess the success.

As a brand, you should opt for an experiential marketing agency that has the potential of delivering the correct immersive experience & lasting impression for the experiential marketing campaign & that has a good connection with your team.

In case you do not like the way of working & if your intuition states that they are not the correct fit, do not hire them. Selecting the correct experiential marketing agency is the initial step in business relations that requires feeling like a very trusted friend.