The world of marketing and advertising is becoming increasingly sophisticated as both technology and audiences evolve. Businesses who want to keep up with the times are increasingly integrating experiential marketing methods into their strategy. Here’s a look at what this involves, and how LED displays can help you to achieve your goals.
What is experiential marketing?
Experiential marketing is a type of marketing that directly engages with consumers, rather than treating them as passive recipients of advertising and marketing messages. The traditional ways to reach an audience are increasingly becoming redundant, as it is possible to install ad blockers and skip over commercials.
Therefore businesses are looking for new ways to engage with consumers. Experiential marketing seeks to connect through experiences that encourage the consumer to engage directly with the brand. This allows for a more authentic and memorable connection to be created between the business and consumer.
These experiences are typically in-person, such as a pop-up store or launch party, but they can also have digital elements such as a LED video wall displays. There are no fixed rules about what experiential marketing methods work best, and this will vary depending on the type of business, the target audience, and overall aims and goals of the campaign.
The best experiential marketing campaigns will be memorable and go beyond tried and tested traditional methods to engage with consumers. The brand should be clearly represented so that the connection is made in the minds of the target audience, and the nature of the campaign should be in keeping with the brand identity.
Often, an experiential marketing strategy will evolve over time, and even be driven by the interactions of consumers. This helps people to form a deeper emotional connection to a brand, and fosters a sense of loyalty and belonging. The campaign should have measurable outcomes, which could be social media engagements, head counts, or feedback surveys.
How can LED display walls be integrated into your experiential marketing?
LED displays can play a key role in experiential marketing, because they are highly versatile, have an immediate visual impact, and can have interactive features. Unlike traditional static billboards, they can create fully immersive experiences. For example, fashion brands can recreate a high definition catwalk display to showcase their latest designs.
When placed in high traffic areas such as shopping centres, airports, or outdoor urban environments, a large-scale video wall display will be impossible to ignore. The vibrant colours and dynamic content can be tailored to target specific audiences, and even automatically adjust to suit the weather or time of day.
This can help to deliver the most relevant messages at the right time, such as a restaurant chain who wants to target early morning commuters with ads for coffee and bacon rolls, and lunchtime passersby with ads for burgers, sandwiches and so on.
Interactive features
LED displays can be interactive, with touchscreen controls or automated responses to audience behaviour. They can also be integrated with social media to encourage visitors to share their photographs and comments, creating a buzz both online and in the physical event space. This helps to raise brand awareness and build customer loyalty.
One notable example of this is reported by Business News Daily. The campaign was for Lean Cuisine, and the target audience was women who wanted to lose weight.
However, rather than deliver the usual messages about diet, which can imply that an individual is currently at fault or unacceptable as they are, the campaign #WeighThis focused on other issues.
Women were invited to ‘weigh in’ with something that mattered to them, rather than their weight. The responses were displayed on a digital gallery wall in Grand Central Terminal, New York City. The display was branded with Lean Cuisine’s social media handles, but there were no slogans or calls to action.
The interactive experience itself was used to raise brand awareness, and it was easily measurable by recording the number of responses, which amounted to over 204 million. By any standards, this was a highly successful campaign, and it is an excellent example of how interactive LED displays can be at the forefront of modern advertising methods.