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What is Experience Marketing? | DigitalMarketer

Experience marketing, also known as "experience marketing", is a strategy in which personal events are used to advertise products.

Take pop-up shops or Apple's legendary keynote, for example. Each of these events is experience marketing at work. They should give interested parties the opportunity to familiarize themselves with a product before buying it. In a makeup or sneaker popup shop, potential customers can view the products that are usually only available online.

The goal of experience marketing is to create a really good customer experience and to optimize customer benefit. You want everyone to show the event on their Instagram story and Facebook profile and become enthusiastic fans of your brand.

How you do that?

Examples of experience marketing

Example 1: Annual Apple Keynote Events

Apple's annual product launch event is designed to offer attendees a shared experience.

Each participant has access to the latest iPhone, iPad and MacBook and can keep and use them like in an Apple store. This creates an experience, the experience of being able to handle the latest Apple products before anyone else.

Example # 2: Friends Cafe

In NYC there is an exact copy of the Friends Central Perk café. Fans can come and visit, sit on the infamous orange couch, and (most importantly) take an Instagram photo to share with their friends.

This experience marketing enables friends to relive their love for the successful TV show. It creates the experience of being part of the show and being able to interact with one of their biggest sets. Further interpretations of the Central Perk Café can be found in Manchester, Beijing, Shanghai and Buenos Aires.

Example # 3: Kylie Jenner pop-up shops

Kylie Jenner is notorious for turning an e-commerce website into a billion dollar fortune. Her makeup products are incredibly popular with her 156 million Instagram followers, but until recently, they were only available online.

How do you create an experimental marketing campaign for an e-commerce shop? Kylie's answer: pop-up stores. Companies will rent a building for one or more days, brand the entire room, and advertise it on social media. When customers come to the pop-up window, they are faced with product walls and many Instagram-enabled moments.

Example 4: Ikea

Here is an example that you are sure you have experienced yourself. What do you see when you walk through Ikea?

Perfectly staged living spaces (living rooms, kitchens, bathrooms, children's rooms, master bedrooms, etc.) that show you exactly how the experience with a particular piece of furniture would look and feel. Furniture stores (like Ikea) have been relying on experience marketing for years.

Real estate agents did the same by staging furniture for sale on houses for sale. The experience of feeling what furniture would look like in your own home, or seeing what it would be like to live in a house for sale, drives people to buy.

How to start an experience marketing campaign

As with any marketing campaign, the first step is to get to know your customer avatar. What does your customer want to know about your event, restaurant or business?

In the case of Apple's keynote, people want a minimalist, technically influenced environment in which they feel they can experience something that others have not seen. Tim Cook even comes into the product area and takes photos with the participants. That is Expert Experience Marketing.

This creates an unforgettable experience that people want to share. If you're struggling to figure out where to start, you can break down your experience with the 5 senses:

  • View: What do your customers want to see? (Example: Ikea's customers want to see what a couch will look like in a living room.)
  • Sound: What do your customers want to hear? (Example: Apple's customers don't want just someone to speak, they want them to hear from Tim Cook.)
  • Odor: What do your customers want to smell? (Example: Central Perk customers want to go to the cafe and smell fresh coffee)
  • Touch: What do your customers want to touch? (Example: Kylie Jenner's customers want to touch the makeup products and test which color suits their skin tone.)
  • Taste: What do your customers want to try? (Example: Central Perk customers want to drink coffee while hanging out in the legendary café.)

Ultimately, the most important part of experience marketing is to create an experience that is worth sharing – something that makes people connect with your brand and remember what a great experience they made about you to have.

takeaways

# 1: Experience marketing familiarizes customers with a product and creates a closer relationship between the customer and the brand.

# 2: Examples of experience marketing:

  • Events
  • Pop-up Shops
  • restaurants
  • Shops

# 3: The 5 key aspects of an experience marketing strategy are parallel to the five senses: seeing, sounding, smelling, touching and tasting.

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