Experiential teams - could you have done more?
15 Apr 2019
As your promotional bus pulls away from your experiential event and the team high-fives over what a success it has been, ask yourself a simple question… What % of visitors are likely to go on and buy your product? Here are 5 really simple ‘add ons’ you can make to your activity to...
1. Hand Out A Money-Off Coupon
Why not get your brand ambassadors to hand out ‘money off next purchase’ coupons at your event or sampling activity. We’ve seen as many as 25% of those handed out go on to be redeemed in-store – which is great if you can attribute it to your activity.
There’s good reason the printed coupon has survived the test of time. Fitting snuggly into the samplers purse, it’s always there as a constant reminder. Plus it’s really simple (and quick) to produce.
2. Offer A Prize To Incentivise Purchase
Offering a prize that is irresistible to your target audience is a very powerful tool in incentivising those visiting your stand to go on and buy your product instore (sometimes as high as 40% will do this). The prize can be promoted via leaflets handed out or on POS. The prize/s can even help build your experiential theme. You will just need to ensure that in order to enter the promotion, the product has to be purchased first – you’d be surprised how many brands forget to do this.
How can you best use your prize fund?
Imagine you had a £5k prize budget and wanted to offer a luxury holiday to Ibiza. You’ve got 2 ways you could use that budget. You could either offer 1 holiday as a guaranteed prize, running a prize draw at the end of the promotional period. Or option 2, you could offer “the chance to win” 1 of MANY holidays. With option 2 you would need to contact a promotional risk manager to see how they could maximise the prize fund for a bigger, stronger headline. This advise is usually given out free of charge, so it’s well worth seeing what they can do. For a fixed fee of £5k you may well be able to offer “THE CHANCE to win one of 10 luxury holidays to Ibiza” – the only difference being that entrants would then need to text in a URN (for example) with only a set number of URN’s being winning ones. But for sure, the bigger the headline, the more the sales uplift.
3. Get An Email Address To Continue The Relationship
With GDPR upon us, an opted-in consumer email address is worth its weight in gold to a brand. It is high on their priority list, so whatever your brand ambassadors can do to acquire these will get you brownie-points!
Obviously it is essential that the data is gathered in a GDPR complaint fashion. However you can still make it part of a prize-promotion just as long as the opt-in is not a condition of entry.
What better time than when your brand ambassadors have just dazzled them with all your experiential delights and they are fully immersed in the wonder of your brand.
Once opted-in, you then continue the relationship you have started with a well targeted email campaign.
4. Create Some Buzz On Social Media
Promoting a hashtag is a perfect addition to any experimental activity – and gives you the opportunity to tie it in with your theme and add some real fun factor. Including a prize incentive will significantly increase any interaction.
5. Get Some Press Exposure
Finding a hook that is going to get your experiential activity some press exposure is no mean feat – but 100% worth it if you can pull it off! We’ve worked on many over the years, from running an against-the-clock drilling competition for £1million prize… right through to dunking prize winners in a large vat of fizzy drink.
Experiential events can do such a fantastic job of immersing people into their brand – and obviously a huge amount of money and time goes into achieving that. Visitors willingly enter into this brand-bubble – and in GDPR terms are screaming “I’m legitimately interested in you”. Missing this opportunity would be like having a successful first date, but not exchanging phone numbers at the end. It would be disappointing for both parties.
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