Your brand is not always about quality; more often than not, branding is all about perception. That’s why gearing your event marketing tactics toward your brand experience should be a priority.
Creating an effectively branded event marketing experience can engage your audience and even influence their purchasing behaviour. But in order to do so, you need to depart from the just-be-there-where-your-customers-are mindset; today, not only participating in important conferences and events, but you also need to focus on your events’ “conversion rate”: How many of your audience who actually take action on what you’re offering – e.g. Buying your promoted products.
Attractive event stands is a good start, but you should go above and beyond that: Not only attractive, you should strategically craft the whole experience; storytelling your brand throughout your event premise.
Is all the hassles necessary?
In short, the answer is yes.
According to The Event Marketing Institute, 74 percent of the general public says that such experience makes them more likely to buy the promoted product.
The significant figure means one thing: There’s no other choice; you need to delight your audience by appealing to their five senses through your even marketing campaign.
That sounds great and dandy, but how exactly a brand can appeal to the audience holistically through their senses?
The answer lies in sensory branding and marketing.
What is sensory branding?
Essentially, sensory branding is an in-person marketing activity which aims to emotionally connect with customers by appealing to all their senses (source.)
But how do brands do it? They forge an emotional association between their brands and the customers’ minds, typically through creating beliefs, feelings, thoughts and opinions which are engineered toward putting the brands on top of customers’ mind. This is done by using customers’ five senses to influence their purchasing behaviour:
- Smell: Trigger memories and emotions far more quickly than the other senses.
- Sight: It can persuade us against logic!
- Taste: It required all other senses to work together.
- Touch: “Taste” the quality better than the rest.
- Hearing: Sounds set the mood.
Successfully delighting all of those senses, you win.
Sounds complicated? A bit. But we have a simple guide that can help you in getting started with your upcoming event’s planning process, courtesy of Marler Haley.
Cover photo credit: Adrian Rubio Moreno
