How To Leverage What You Already Have To Create Experiential Marketing ResultsDid you know you can exponentially increase your marketing results with what you already have in-house? It will save you money while extending your brand with little or no additional expense for generating new collateral or branded materials. The following is an example of an actual experiential marketing campaign I developed and conducted for one of our clients with amazing results.Having met with a DVD rental chain it was shared they wanted to increase membership, which in turn would result in increased rentals and purchases at their locations. After inspecting one of their locations and asking some revealing questions it was assessed they were wasting an incredible amount of resources by not applying a simple strategy in their marketing and business campaigns. Often businesses are great at focusing on what they are known for but often they are not a master of all domains and disciplines including marketing, experience and community building, etc. (unless that is what their business model is). Accordingly, the most successful businesses call upon knowledgeable pros who are versed in the areas they are not to take care of the areas that the service company is known for. The reality is if you are looking to be successful and you either sell or service widgets, and you need to file a tax return you would hire a CPA, or if you were being sued you would hire a licensed attorney rather than doing it in-house.. wouldn't you?How this campaign transpired and was implemented was I first noticed an enormous amount of reusable rental inventory on the shelves. I asked how many movies went out the door on a daily basis. It was 20% - 30% of entire inventory. We suggested they could use what was left on the shelves to develop an experiential event marketing campaign that would increase their exposure, membership and goodwill by leveraging their liquid assets while not costing them any more money other than printing some promo sheets.. and my fee for consulting.The campaign allowed individuals to rent DVD's at no cost nor obligation for a two week period in unlimited rentals. What that means they could rent as many movies they wanted to without limit just so long as they returned the one they had before taking out another. They were able to repeatedly do this for two weeks. Because up to 80% of the movies sat on the shelves and they would receive them back there was no out of pocket costs or loss to implement this strategy. The only requirement is they signed up for new membership, which required a credit card or cash for security in case they took off with the inventory. During the program we found that some people rented more than one movie in a single day, that means they had to come to the stores twice or more.After the program ended our follow-ups found new memberships doubled to tripled depending on location, paid rentals were up 26%, and a new customer said when they got home from work and was returning home from subway station they found themselves headed for our customer's location without realizing it. This is the power of a true experiential strategy implemented seamlessly .. and it was done within a two week period.We have applied experiential strategies to services, products and destinations repeatedly and have seen outcomes that are notably sustainable and powerful.Photo credit: www.punchline-gloucester.com.
