Turn Your Website Into an Experiential Destination

Turning your brick-and-mortar location into an experiential destination is key to crafting a leading Customer Experience in the modern age of the customer. People have so many options, utilizing experiential events is a greta way to stand out among the crowd. This same approach can now be utilized for your brand’s digital Customer Experience, because of advanced virtual reality technology. Turning your organizational website into an experiential destination can improve your web traffic, therefore improving your ability to attract and reach customers via this channel. To learn more, check out Patrick Niersbach’s piece for Forbes. You can access the piece by clicking here, or by reading below:

This piece was originally published by Forbes on December 8, 2017.

“Brand loyalty is a funny thing: It’s incredibly difficult to establish, but it’s also incredibly valuable. Yet one wrong move — or lack thereof — can ruin the relationship. There are certain marketing tactics, such as experiential marketing, that have proven to generate brand affinity through fun and engaging events.

Experiential marketing is not a new concept and there are brands out there absolutely crushing it right now. JetBlue’s icebreaker campaign and AMC’s Los Pollos Hermanos restaurant pop-up campaign are just two examples of companies doing a great job engaging directly with their audiences and creating memorable experiences that develop into meaningful and lasting relationships. Yet while this has proven to be a great strategy, it does come with its pitfalls. Historically, it has been an expensive tactic and one that may not fit every brand.

Thanks to advances in technology, specifically the evolution of virtual and augmented reality, the barriers to entry are being lowered. Brands large and small can now experiment with creating exciting, engaging experiences — and get them into the hands of their consumers easily and quickly. And to top it all off, they are no longer limited to the bounds of the physical world.

For example, imagine Cubs fans being able to put on VR headsets at a concession stand behind home plate or at home and virtually being able to hit balls into the bleachers at Wrigley Field to earn free swag or discounted coupons for gear. Sounds fun, right? Or maybe you’re a fashion brand and want your target audience to feel what it is like to walk the catwalk during Fashion Week in Paris. That’s the great thing about VR — you can do anything and go anywhere, but instead of forking over hundreds of thousands of dollars for amazing one-time experiences, you can create a repeatable experience in virtual for less time and far less money. These are the types of interactive marketing experiences that VR makes possible.

Experiential marketing doesn’t have to be limited to the B2C crowd either. At the end of the day, B2B buyers are humans and have emotions, too. Virtual opens doors for companies to market their services and products to the businesses that use them in a more exciting, engaging way. There is a huge opportunity there for forward-thinking marketers in the space.

Tracking And Metrics

If you’re investing in experiential marketing tactics, you want to know how your campaign actually performed, right?

In addition to being able to create, well, virtually anything, VR gives you the ability to track almost anything as well. I know we all love our impression estimates and brand perception metrics, and those are still important, but wouldn’t you love to also be able to know exactly how many people engaged with your experience, what they did and for how long? This will allow you to truly understand what aspects of your experience worked best and what you can improve upon the next time. And, because it’s digital, you can easily change the things that didn’t work.

The Future Of Commerce?

What if someone enjoyed their experience so much they wanted to buy your product right then and there? Because it is an interactive digital experience, it will be possible to add a way to make payments within a virtual environment in the near future. Innovative companies have already started brainstorming ways to make virtual commerce a reality, and this will be a key feature when virtual marketing goes mainstream.

Even though we are still in the infancy of consumer adoption of AR/VR, the benefits of creating immersive virtual brand experiences will be many. A few forward-thinking brands are already experimenting with this medium, and it is only a matter of time until we all use these technologies on a daily basis. It will be the brands that know how to maximize this medium that will be building meaningful, long-lasting loyalty with tomorrow’s consumer.”

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