How does experiential marketing lead to sales?

Grant Leboff: One of the things I was quite taken with in the book, was that you talked about the 'AIDA' purchase funnel; Attention, Interest, Desire, Action in terms of experiential, which I think a lot of people just think of experiential as just a fun event, but it doesn't actually go through any sort of purchase structure and you said that it does. So can you maybe explain that for us a bit more?

Shirra Smilansky: Absolutely Grant. I guess when you're planning your channels and your experiential marketing campaign, there's so many different types of executions out there. So for example; an ambient media execution of a giant mural being painted live in a city square, or a light projection campaign across some landmark buildings at night, or some chalk stencils that have been applied on the pavement to create some kind of directional media opportunity. These are all examples of executions which are primarily awareness drivers. Designed not so much for an in depth engagement on a one on one basis with a person in a human sense, but actually something creative which can be done as a bit of mass media in a non-traditional way. From the perspective of the AIDA model where the first stage looks to create awareness, those would be examples of slightly non-traditional creative executions which could fit nicely within a broader integrated experiential marketing campaign and we'll achieve that first objective.

If on the other hand, you wanted to move into Interest, Desire and Action, the last kind of three stages of the AIDA module, it might be that your real world  live brand experience event - obviously you mentioned an event - had the opportunity for brand influencers, social media influencers to come down, participate in the experience, maybe before it was open to the general public, for example. And that content which was generated from those influencers gives a sense of endorsement, personal recommendation, and ultimately drives that Interest and Desire, which you'd expect to see from that peer to peer influence.

On the other hand; Action, the final phase where you're really looking for a much more direct call to action, possibly to actually drive sales, you might create a mechanic within your life brand experience or maybe within your retail experience which had an experiential angle to it. Something which really drove that conversion at the point of purchase, whether that be on ecommerce or in a physical kind of bricks and mortar environment.

Grant Leboff: So do you have any advice for how someone - because there's a lot there - how someone would start to map this out and start to think about how they can start to match certain parts of experiential to the outcomes they're looking for? Is there a way that you start to do that?

Shirra Smilansky: Absolutely. When you're a little bit experienced in experiential marketing you might already know, for example, that by positioning an activity directly outside your store, you could then drive footfall into that store. So if your objective was to drive footfall into your store, then it might be obvious, but you should think within the parameters of placing something directionally, immediately outside your store with a mechanic. If you're completely new and you have no idea what different objectives might be achieved through different methods and you have to start from the drawing board, I would say, just bear in mind that you've got a scale of engagement and you've got a scale of footfall, and with a real world physical live brand experience or an execution that's an event based or face to face execution, you've always got that balance between dwell time and footfall.

So in the location which has a very, very high footfall, meaning that obviously, people are very rapidly moving through that space and high volumes, it's likely to say that they won't have such a high dwell time. It's probably the case, but if they are really moving through at a fast speed, they're not stopping for more than say 20 seconds to a minute at a time. You can start off by looking at each location from the perspective of what engagement opportunity it provides. So you can understand that if you've got a high volume of people with a low dwell time, the engagement opportunity is to do something which is very quick and can reach a large number of people. If on the other hand, your location gives you an opportunity to have a really in depth engagement, a really in depth opportunity to get to know that target audience member and participate in something that maybe takes five, 10, 15 minutes or longer, but at a lower volume, so less of those people would have the opportunity to partake in your experience. That gives you an opportunity to have a deeper engagement. Maybe communicate some more complex brand messages, educate them about your product, really try it in an in depth way and layer on some brand building opportunities into that experience.

How can you create an activity that brings your brand personality to life? How can you generate some user generated content or create some kind of further call to action around sharing and creating content for the consumer? By understanding the appropriate execution for your location, you can start to think about what you would do where, and I guess where you want to be, really comes down to who your target audience is, who are you trying to speak to?

So if you're a fashion brand launching a new range, targeted at a young audience, well which areas are actually frequented by that audience? By starting to see that that location might be available, and that location might have a high density of your audience, you can say well, okay, and what's the football and what's the dwell time?

Therefore what's the appropriate type of engagement and layer to that what you want to achieve for your business. So is it sales? Is it awareness? Is it traffic to your website? Is it data capture? For example.