Boost Your Holiday Marketing Strategy With Experiential Marketing

A holiday marketing strategy is incomplete if you haven’t given your customers memorable experiences. Experiential marketing is the best fit to help you drive your brand message wrapped in fun and festive holiday campaigns. Here are three tips to boost your holiday marketing strategy with experiential marketing.

The holidays are approaching and marketers have the perfect opportunity to connect with and engage customers by joining in the festivities. You also need to ensure that your holiday marketing strategy is clever enough to stand out in a crowded holiday marketing space.

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Experiential marketing helps a brand connect with customers and develop experiences that engage them and strike an emotional chord. Here are three tips to capture the festive mood and begin the holiday season with experiential marketing.
 

For customers, the experience a brand provides has become the most important aspect of shopping – whether that experience be offline or online. During the holiday shopping season push, it’s easy for marketers to overlook experience as a key differentiator, when there are countless other efforts underway like ensuring their website platform can handle more visitors and going to market with holiday ad campaigns. However, research shows that “experience” outweighs the traditional “four P’s of marketing” and as such, should be taken seriously over the course of the year and especially during the holiday season when marketers have the opportunity to attract and retain new customers, and keep existing ones. Only when online and offline customer experience is treated as a business and marketing imperative can retailers thrive during the holiday season.

-Tim de Paris, CTO at Decibel, said exclusively to MarTech Advisor
 

Learn More: SharkNinja and Clarabridge on How to Champion Customer Experience Management (CEM) Effectively

How to Boost Your Holiday Marketing Strategy With Experiential Marketing?
 

Prospective and returning shoppers can easily search for gifts and deals across countless sites, and marketers need to keep up by ensuring a flawless experience. Otherwise, they risk losing those shoppers to other brands, and thus potential revenue. To achieve this goal, marketers must understand digital body language – or the way users feel when interacting with a website or app. Equipped with real-time behavioral data, marketers can pinpoint customer frustrations and errors, like broken holiday coupon codes or an error page. If a problem area is identified, marketers can intervene on the experience, offering compensation or alleviating the problem, and use the data to inform the strategy for the rest of the season. With behavioral data, marketers can alleviate a negative experience quickly, rather than traditional tools like A/B testing and Net Promotor Scores (NPS), that could take an entire season to generate results.

~ Tim de Paris, CTO at Decibel, said exclusively to MarTech Advisor

Experiential marketing is all about interweaving your marketing message with experiences to create memorable moments so that the customers can connect with your brand emotionally and recall your brand during purchase moments.

During the holiday season, holiday marketing strategies are centered around creating brand awareness and brand recall by sending out happy messages and stimulating senses. To make your holiday marketing strategy stand out you can try the following experiential marketing strategies and brand examples:

1. Tradition
 

Holidays and festivals are all about traditions because they help you rekindle memories and relive the good old days. Many brands create experiences around traditions, which helps people remember and associate with them and look forward to such campaigns year after year.
 

Image Source: Shopify.com
Vintage Image of People at Macy’s New York Herald Square Store’s First Window Display

For example, Macy’s has a tradition of holiday story-telling since 1874. Their New York’s Herald Square store first displayed holiday stories in ‘window displays’ (plated glass windows), which drew thousands of people. This has now become a cherished holiday tradition at Macy’s. The 2019 Holiday windows will take customers on a journey, with the main character ‘Santa Girl’.

“This year’s windows take us on a journey with our main character “Santa Girl. Through her, we’re charmed by the power of magical thinking and we’re reminded that we all have Santa’s spirit in our hearts,” says Roya Sullivan, Macy’s National Director of Window Presentation.

Pro Tip: When you blend tradition with your holiday marketing strategy, your customers wait for the experiences you create and re-create. This helps your brand message resonate with your customers and effectively engage them in the process.

2. Emotion
 

Experiential marketing is successful if it can stir up customers’ emotions. Building moments that create a sense of nostalgia will help your brand form emotional bonds with your customers.

U.K. retailer Boots’ Show Them You Know Them campaign, depicts the relationship dynamics of two sisters who grew up together and how Boots products were an integral part of their lives. This advertisement celebrates sibling love and how family and friends shared this love in the form of gifts.

Pro Tip: Affection, love, the joy of sharing, and nostalgia are primary emotions during the holiday season. Bringing these emotions to the forefront and helping your customers express these emotions is how you can invigorate the holiday spirit in them.

Learn More: The Human Touch: Marketers' Journey to Emotional Connection

3. Excitement
 

Holidays bring excitement and many brands such as Home Depot use technology to create immersive experiences and generate a buzz.

Home Depot drove excitement and brand awareness for their holiday décor selection with an Augmented Reality (AR) ad unit in their Yahoo Mail campaign to offer a glimpse into the large selection of their holiday decorations. Customers who interacted with this immersive ad could view the Christmas tree and all its’ decorations in their homes. This motivated them to explore more products and convinced them to make the purchase.

Pro Tip: Using technologies such as AR and VR can help create immersive experiences for customers. Customers can engage with holiday moments for ‘real’ and connect better with your holiday marketing message.

Learn More: What Magic Can Marketers Make with Augmented Reality?

Key Takeaways for Your Holiday Marketing Strategy

Brands look to tap into the magic, fun, and frolic of the holidays. Experiential marketing if executed well can perfectly play into this special time of the year. Here are a few tips for your holiday marketing strategy:

1. Keep it traditional with favorite holiday moments
2. Create or relive memories while creating emotional experiences
3. Drive excitement with immersive experiences
4. Focus on bringing joy to your customers
    

And remember, packing your marketing message with powerful experiences will help you form lasting relationships with your customers this holiday season and beyond. As Tim de Paris, CTO at Decibel, says, “When considering online shopping, the holidays provide marketers with a larger pool of website visitors. By understanding and analyzing the overarching behavioral themes – like frustrations, engagements or confusions – marketers can take that knowledge and use it to inform their long-term strategy throughout the year. For example, if during the holiday season more consumers showcase engagement behaviors on a less-detailed product descriptor, which led to them pressing the “add to cart” button, marketers might choose to use similar phrasing and structure on other product descriptions. If customers during the holiday season showcased frustrations the most during the checkout process, they may want to reevaluate the form they’re using and update it for better user experience.”

May the festivities begin!

Will you light up the holiday season with experiential marketing? Tell us how on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook; we’re always listening.