How Technology-led Experience Marketing Is Helping Brands Connect With Their Audience

In recent times, customers aren't satisfied with learning about a product through a simple advertisement. As such, experiential marketing has become very popular. These campaigns are increasingly mainstream because they don't just dump information on customers; they create ways for them to experience it. The best part is that these campaigns aren't limited to big brands; no matter the size of your business, you can use them too if you know which technology to use. As such, here is a beginner's guide to technology-led experience marketing and how brands could use it to connect with their audience better

What is Technology-led Experience Marketing?

Technology-led experience marketing, as the name suggests, is a marketing approach brands take that involves making use of new and emerging technologies to create interactive experiences that are also immersive and memorable. The reason making them interactive is important is because it encourages audience active participation instead of passively consuming information.

Since such campaigns are technology-led, they aren't fixated on a particular technology, which gives brands the freedom to choose a solution that works for their projects. So, a retail fashion brand could make use of AR smart mirrors to let their customers virtually try on their products like makeup, glasses, and more. Automotive brands could use VR as gamified experiences to let customers take virtual test drives of their upcoming or existing car models. 

The important thing to remember here is that these campaigns are less about what technologies are used and more about how they are used to improve the marketing experience. Thus, a business could use multiple technologies like motion sensors or IoT and still fail because of lackluster content or experience, while another could benefit from something simple like large touchscreen displays, but since their experience was engaging, it can become a huge success.

Different Technologies that Can be Used for Tech-led Experience Marketing

Touchscreens, Kiosks, and Displays

Starting with the simplest yet effective technology, we have touchscreens, kiosks, displays, and installations that can sense and process motions or gestures. The basic goal of such experiences is to let customers engage with the installation so that there is some form of back-and-forth with the interactions. This ensures not only that the customer is participating but also gives the brand an idea of how immersive their experience is.

Thus, if the customers are dropping the sessions, it is safe to assume that they either don't like the content because it isn't fun or there might be some technical issues that lead to a poor experience, causing them to leave. But when the audience completes their sessions, the campaign can be considered a success because a higher success rate indicates the experience was fun, which led to the audience staying around.

Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) solutions are also great options when it comes to giving your audience an immersive experience. With AR, there are web- and app-based solutions. Web-based solutions are easy and quick to set up. While app-based AR solutions offer a lot more features and functionality. Both are great and can engage an audience where a brand can expect a large crowd.

Unlike AR, which brings digital elements to the real world using smartphones or tablets. VR solutions make use of special hardware like headsets to take the user to a digital world. These solutions are best when immersiveness is the top priority of a brand.

Holographic Installations

When it comes to holographic technology, there are various kinds of solutions like holographic displays, fans, projection systems, and holotubes. This is basically an advanced visualization technique that takes normal 2D content and creates an illusion, allowing the content to be presented in a manner such that it appears 3D. Thus, businesses could use this technology to introduce mascots for their brands or products. Additionally, it can also be combined with other technologies like AI to create virtual assistants to improve the customers' shopping experience.

Benefits of Technology-led Experiential Marketing

When a technology-led campaign is well-designed, it benefits the business in more than one way; here are some of the common advantages:

• Greater audience engagement: The reason a brand goes for technology-led experiential marketing in the first place is because they want to ensure that the audience not only pays attention to its upcoming product or service but also enjoys it. Both of these problems are solved with an immersive experience campaign.
• Creative storytelling freedom: When a business has the right technology, it doesn't have to worry about the lack of resources that prevents their vision from becoming a reality. Instead, they get the full freedom to express their creativity and create a storytelling experience worthy of their brand. 
• Organic reach: When people genuinely enjoy or get a unique experience from a marketing experience, they tend to share it with their friends or peers. It could be taking photos or videos and posting them on social media, sharing with or tagging their friends, or just talking about it. This improves your brand's organic reach, as people are not learning about your business through an ad but rather through word of mouth and thus are more likely to give your product or service a try.
• Improved Brand Recall: Another advantage of technology-led experience marketing is that it improves your brand recall. The reason is the same as that for better organic reach, as when people enjoy your experiential campaign, they are more likely to remember your brand when the topic of a similar product or service comes up.
• Gives insightful data: This is a benefit more for brands over audience. During marketing campaigns, typically, attendance of a large crowd is expected. Thus, this brings a lot of potential data that the brands can use to learn how people interact with their products or services. Using this data can help them improve the experience of both their products and the campaigns to ensure that future events deliver the intended experience or if the current event went well how they could expand on it.

In conclusion, technology-led experiences are the future of marketing campaigns. It is becoming essential for brands if they want to meaningfully connect with their audience. Not only are such campaigns flexible because the business can decide what kind of technologies they want to use, but they also benefit them in multiple ways with the most important of them being allowing them to connect with their audience.

Ready to Build your Next Technology-led Marketing Campaign?

Ink In Caps is a MarTech agency that has been in the experiential marketing industry for more than 8 years. Be it experience centers, AR, VR, holographic displays, or more, we have several projects under our belt with proven results to show for it. Contact us and our team of experts will reach out to you and together we can work to build the next technology-led marketing experience that is perfect for your brand and reaches your target audience.