The key to creating an emotional connection with your potential clientele is through experience-based marketing. No longer is this kind of marketing a tactic used by offbeat companies and advertising teams; interactive event experiences are becoming the mainstream way in which the attention — and loyalty — of consumers are captured.
These experiences offer marketers more than just a way to get business from a few attending the event. Such moments can be used for content creation, and thus can lead to conversations and engagement across a range of platforms, especially on social media.
So, if you’re looking for ways to build interaction and optimize your company’s marketing punch, you need to look into building content moments.
What “Content Moments” Do
In short, content moments occur within events and are meant to be the ultimate catalyst for content creation. Moreover, the content created from such moments has the goal of brand distribution and social amplification, and aims to take dialogue about a brand or product to the next level. With such potential, it’s no wonder brands are now designing their event experiences with content generation as a focus.
This is a far change from traditional marketing techniques, and it has to do with the change in the consumer. Nowadays, people don’t want to be sold something. They want to be involved, they want to be sharing and they want to be creating. For marketers, the way to do this is through experience-based moments.
Adidas’ marketing strategy during the 2014 World Cup is a good example of how to create content moments. During the World Cup, Adidas produced a YouTube series, called “The Dugout,” which showcased everything from match recaps to player interactions.
To engage its audience across the globe, Adidas crowdsourced questions for players and searched through comments across social media to find the most trending World Cup topics. Letting the fans shape the content narrative had a powerful result: 15 million visitors went to Adidas’ website from YouTube during the World Cup.
Why You Need “Content Moments”
Simply put, the survival of your brand—and company— depends on your team’s ability to create impactful content moments through events. Joe Pulizzi, an influential voice in content marketing, states that “when you’re creating content and you’re getting feedback from the audience it allows you to hone your vision.”
By producing content that is able to activate your audience, you can gain a more clear understanding of what the customer wants. Hence, content moments are not only at the heart of content marketing, they are at the heart of the entire business.
Experiential marketing possesses the potential to give consumers personalized environments in which they can create lasting connections with your brand. By seeing how they interact, you can learn to improve your product. In the end, that means greater opportunity to create a lifelong connection with customers.
How You Can Create “Content Moments”
Obviously, the details will depend largely on what kind of business you have, but idea remains the same: to create brand experiences to drive engagement and increase your loyal customer base.
When carrying out this experiential strategy, you have to realize that content moment creations are everywhere, and engagement on platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook occur across a number of topics every day.
When you design event experiences, you always want to have social sharing on your mind—and you should encourage consumers to share. Furthermore, to better engage your audience, utilize all the technology at your disposal (for instance, virtual reality can create incredibly immersive experiences for all sorts of products).
To ensure your resources for event marketing are best used, you should also be analyzing data points, perhaps acquired through the use of beacons on-site, and formulating actionable insights from that data about how to best curate experiences for your audience. Reacting to how your customers react is the best way to ensure success in your ongoing experiential strategy.