Let’s kick this off on the right foot, do you know why brand activations are done?
Over 90% of consumers will react positively to a brand after participating in a brand activation of theirs. Close to 100% of people who attend or experience a brand activation will create content and publish it as a result of this experience!
We don’t know about you, but those sound like numbers all brands should be wanting to tap into, and you can do just that with the right brand activation. What do you need to create amazing brand activations?
We’ve got you covered with the 7 elements you’ll want to know before you plan your brand activation.
1. Set Your Objectives
Brand activations are no different from any other marketing campaign in the sense of wanting to achieve something. But before you launch anything, you always do it in hopes of increasing sales, raising brand awareness, or generating more foot traffic.
Whatever the objectives are, set them before you launch your brand activation. You need to know what you want your activation to help you achieve, ultimately, it will help you with the how, as well.
2. Know Your Audience Well
Brand activations are usually physical experiences that consumers and attendees have or participate in. To get these people to come to the counter or to pick up the product, you need to know them well enough to know what will catch their attention and hold it.
So, your brand activation campaign has to have a clearly defined ideal target audience. Who are they? What do they like? What will they like about your brand? What matters to them? How will you turn them into a customer?
3. Stay True To Your Brand
It’s very exciting planning brand activations! You decide on the giveaways and the competitions, perhaps prizes, and what the stand will look like, plus much more.
When you’re consumed with generating activation ideas and coming up with a strategy for your brand activation, and designing concepts, it can be easy to get overwhelmed and swallowed in the creativity. But one of the most important elements of any brand activation is the brand’s identity.
Everything you create for your brand activation should be aligned with your brand’s identity and persona, colors should be the same, your brand’s tone and voice should be consistent, and your brand personality needs to be coherent.
4. Focus On The Experience
Brand activations really are an experiential marketing activity. The activation strategy of experiential marketing, which is also known as engagement marketing, involves a brand creating an immersive, real-world experience in order to engage its target audience.
In these experiences, the brand’s values and the views it wishes to convey to its audience are not limited to its specific products.
By all means, this doesn’t mean that you can’t focus on a specific product or service in your brand activation but you should focus on the experience that you’re trying to create as opposed to just trying to sell, sell, sell.
5. Use Storytelling In Your Activations
Every successful brand activation has a great story to tell, one that is not only aligned with the brand but also stands almost as its own mini-brand or mini-event. For this to be successful, the focus should be on the participants and how they can use the brand to tell their own stories.
You could create one of the best brand activations by putting one together that allows those experiencing it, to tell the story of it.
This can be something as simple as a consumer being given a well-designed shirt at the activation, and then willingly taking a photo wearing it and sharing their experience, which brings us to our next point.
6. Always Be “Social Media-able”
Social media has changed the game of marketing and advertising. The world of brand recognition becomes slightly more chaotic when we think of social media forming part of our brand activation strategies and tactics.
We’ve all heard the term, “Instagrammable”, which means to make something so awesome that people have to share it on their Instagram page! This should be your goal with your brand activations and could be the element that you’re missing.
By making people want to share photos and videos of your brand activation, you’re almost ticking off a branch of your content marketing strategy. You’re allowing your audience to engage with and advertise your brand for you.
7. Opt For Surprise And Uniqueness
There’s definitely something about the shock factor when it comes to brands. If you can surprise and shock your audience, there’s a much higher chance that they will talk about and share your message.
This is within reason though! Sensitive issues should not be made fun of, and discrimination is never a good idea.
Consider coming up with a unique interactive concept for your brand. In order to leave a lasting impression on the audience, the experience must be different from anything they’ve done before. For example, if your brand creates miniature items, then you could have a competition of audience members to create a miniature version of something else.
Or, get them talking with a clown head that pops out of the wall when you pop a balloon! You get the idea, surprises that will stay with them long after the brand activation experience is done, that’s what you should be after.
Building Beautiful Brand Activations
Brand activations are sometimes thought of as boring and mundane, particularly if you consider that most of us think of the young girl pushing shampoo on you at your local drugstore.
But brand activations should be so much more than that! They should be fun, engaging, and unique so that the people who love your brand can fall in love with it even more, and those that don’t know the brand, leave with a lasting impression.
Whatever brand activation idea that you choose to roll with, will be largely dependent on the exhibit partner you choose to help you make your ideas a reality. Contact us to bring your brand activation concepts to life.