The world, society, and the consumer evolve and, consequently, the sales strategy has to consider the changing environment and new consumption models. Marketing has had a very clear evolution, from focusing on the product to focusing on the consumer and their intrinsic needs, to contemplating the values, needs, and concerns of people.
What are the challenges of buyer-focused marketing?
The big mistake is to focus on the brand or product. We have to create strategies focused on our buyers, analyzing them, capturing their needs and desires, as well as knowing the environment where they move.
Focusing the strategy on the consumer will allow us to create personalized campaigns, targeting the specific customer through certain channels, or considering the appropriate omnichannel approach. This will allow us to work on relationships with our clients and promote loyalty with them.
What is shopper marketing?
How to convince the buyer at your point of sale? The inputs that the customer finds before making the purchase decision at the point of sale are infinite: a wide variety of products, categories, models, sections, as well as the products to choose from at the point of sale. The shopper marketing works to consider all the stimuli and tactics to capture the target audience in the store, build the brand in their mind and influence the customer’s buying process.
What is experiential marketing?
An experience is made of feeling, knowing, or witnessing something. If we add the term “marketing”, the definition evolves towards the strategy or philosophy of creating experiences to reach the customer creatively and memorably while creating emotional bonds between consumers and brands. Once the definition of experience marketing is clear, it should be noted that the most important thing is the focus, that is, the customer and not the product or the brand.
Brands that are capable of positively stimulating our senses make us live experiences that will later remain in the minds of our consumers. Sensory pleasure is composed of the emotions and feelings that these experiences generate, which are essential for decision-making.
Experiential marketing is a perfect way to increase sales through interaction while building brand awareness and loyalty. Experiential campaigns can run online through VR or augmented reality, or combined with brick and mortar shopper marketing.
Experiential marketing has the following aspects:
Senses
It is necessary to stimulate their senses (sight, taste, touch, hearing, and smell) and appeal to their basic instincts to connect with consumers. When the sensory experiences are connected to the promotion, they add value to your brand.
Emotions
Positive emotions of pleasure, joy, and happiness have a great impact on the purchase decisions of the people, and on how they see a brand.
Lifestyle
Keeping up with the existing trends and changing lifestyle is important for the brands to always stay in consumers’ thoughts.
Thoughts
When a brand uses creativity and innovation in how they present their product and sell solutions, the clients are positively inclined towards them.
Relations
Generating interaction and creating communities turn a brand into a cult for the social animals that they keep following religiously without considerations.
How can combining shopper marketing with experiential marketing produce exceptional results?
Research has shown that consumers who have had the opportunity to experience or interact with the product are 96% more inclined to make a purchase.
Combining shopper marketing with experiential retail marketing offers brands a good opportunity to collect data, generate social media coverage, and measure strategies.
It is no secret that large brands use these techniques to maintain dominance in the market, but it is equally important for small companies or start-ups to engage with their clients to increase customer base and build loyalty.
The digital age continues to challenge traditional marketing to adapt to new technologies and the changes that these imply in the behavior of their consumers. For this reason, experiential marketing provides an approach that invites brands and companies to move away from the invasive promotion of their products and to redirect their efforts towards a vital agent for the success of their business: their customers.
Persuading the consumer has never been an easy task. Their reactions and interests may vary from one personality to another as well as their level of satisfaction. However, one of the main advantages for the brands in stores is that, with the emerging technology, they can combine brick and mortar shopper marketing with experiential retail marketing.