Brand activation is a critical part of marketing, but what exactly is it? And how can you create an effective activation strategy for your brand? This blog post will discuss the goals and types of brand activations and provide some tips for creating an engaging campaign. Let's get started!
Brand Activation Strategy and Objectives
A successful brand activation strategy includes using sampling campaigns to engage consumers and build brand awareness. For example, in-store and online product sampling campaigns encourage direct consumer interaction with the product.
Brand activation strategy should match the brand's goals, according to which the outcomes of any given campaign could be rated. Like other marketing goals here, you should only list achievable objectives such as:
- Customer acquisition
- Social media engagement
- Impressions
- User sign-ups
As you guess, each goal requires different solutions and tactics, which are the breakdown of brand activation strategy. According to certain goals, some metrics determined that brand activation should meet to succeed. A brand activation requires some logistics and a clear brand playbook containing several documents such as:
- The vision of the event
- Key targets' value proposition
- Character
- Brand personality
- Target audience (Persona)
- Brand voice
- Brand experiences
Remember, several brand activations are completely online or have at least a live stream with an online audience. Some online solutions help you plan better logistics for individual campaigns in online brand activation. You will enjoy these solutions if you have something to put in a box and deliver to your target audience to achieve some branding goals.
Read more: The Ins and Outs Of Product Sampling Marketing: The Ultimate Guide To Enhancing Your Brand
Example of Brand Activation Goales with suitable Techniques
Sampling campaigns are a great example of how brands can increase visibility and foster customer loyalty. These campaigns can be executed both physically and digitally.
You can brainstorm to shape a multi-touch experience that pleases people in brand activation when you have achievable goals. Here are some examples of brand activation goals/objectives with suitable techniques.
Goal: Brand Awareness / Increase Impressions
- Sampling campaigns (Giveaways, online contests, influencer marketing, etc.).
- In-Store or In-Studio events with an online video stream.
- Virtual Interactive Events.
Goal: Customer Acquisition / Increase Sales
- Digital Marketing Solutions (engage the target audience through online surveys and campaigns such as PPC, display advertising, etc.).
- Social Media Promotion (Influencer marketing, arranging online interactive events, etc.).
- Virtual, live, or online demonstrations.
Goal: Social Media Brand Awareness
- Social Media Contest (with easy rules).
- Social Media Campaigns (try to make a hashtag hot on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social media networks).
- Produce and encourage people to produce unique video and viral content.
Brand Activation Types
Sampling campaigns, experiential events, and pop-up shops are common brand activation methods that effectively increase brand engagement and customer interaction.
Depending on the size of the business and its target audience, several brand activation types are popular among new and established brands. Prestigious brands with large budgets often use experimental marketing to showcase their creative interactive designs in concerts or festivals, increase brand awareness, or launch a new product. In the following, you can find the list of brand activation types.
1- Experimental Marketing Events
Well-known brands use experimental marketing (XM) to connect face-to-face with their customers. Experimental marketing provides several multi-touch brand impressions in unique interactive experiences with the brands or products. From adult-sized baby strolls offered by Contour to producing milkshakes in square form and selling only in exchange to Instagram posts by Sonic, experimental marketing is where creative brand-sponsored experiences happen.
In modern examples of experimental marketing often a combination of online and offline branding campaigns such as influencer marketing in-store/in-studio parties, online stream, social media live and giveaway campaigns, live contests, and similar solutions help brands achieve millions of global impressions for their new series of products or services.
Social media users love watching event video content in live or media releases, and brands like Contour, Sonic, and Vitamin water feed these users some unique, cool, and memorable moments. Digital marketing is an inseparable component of any modern experimental marketing campaign or event that helps brands achieve millions of impressions.
2- Promotional Marketing
Through digital marketing apps and social media campaigns, new brands and startups try promotional marketing to achieve new customers or even new markets. The sonic brand produced Instagram-shaped shakes to sell to concertgoers who share its photo. Running social media campaigns and various types of influencer marketing are some types of promotional marketing used by modern brands to achieve important brand activation goals.
Promotional marketing is useful to gain a loyal customer base that increases brand awareness through reward loyalty programs, free sample giveaways, contests, social media giveaways, special offers, etc. Social media networks provide free online channels to interact with large users and end consumers.
3- Social Media Engage
Revolt influencer marketing campaigns such as annual festivals attract the attention of social media users and increase revolt brand awareness. In these events, celebrities and influencers are hand-picked and curated by brands. Other social media campaigns include online and social media contests or giveaways.
Contemporary social media networks have large numbers of users, and new brands use this capacity to achieve unbelievable goals during their brand activation. Another effective social media engagement solution is sample distribution, which creates a reliable customer base by offering free or sponsored samples in the right target audience's hands.
Read more: Partnering Social Media Marketing with Product Sampling
4- In-Store Retail Brand Activation
Public launch of local shops and stores of well-known brands is another wonderful situation used by interactive designers to show their creative ideas and solutions in surprising brand experiences. Brands use the In-Store space to interact with their customers in unique, creative ways.
Inviting a few well-known influencers to a shop opening increases public attention and impressions. In-store social media interactions are another popular brand activation trend in which customers experience a singular brand experience.
Read more: E-Commerce & Digital Product Sampling - A Perfect Marriage
5- Pop-up Store Brand Activation
In-store marketing provides several advantages that make it profitable for brands to run pop-up store brand activation campaigns. People find Pop-up stores funny and surprising, and they are highly effective in engaging social media users.
From prestigious technology brands like Google to local tea and coffee beverage brands in various cities use pop-up store brand activation campaigns to address their target audience. Some pop-up store brand activations use modern technology like robots and virtual reality experiences to attract more attention.
Sample distribution is common among pop-up store brand activation campaigns, and several types of local retailers use the space of public transportation stations to sell or distribute their products samples. When you have something to sell to local people, one or several pop-up stores in busy city places is the best solution, isn't it?
6- Product Sampling Marketing
After the covid-19 pandemic, some types of product sampling marketing, especially in beauty and skincare products, involved structural changes considering hygiene issues in shared in-store product samplings. Today, individual ready-to-use product sampling is the most popular way to interact with a brand and its products among end consumers.
Sample marketing tries to find a target audience between various crowds and people for which local and online solutions are available. Some digital solutions include packaging and logistics, so brands only need to register their products to start their brand activation with sample marketing.
Read more: Ultimate Guide: Product Sampling Strategies, Methods & Techniques
5 Tips for Brand Activation
Brand activation has a few to do with ongoing general marketing strategy and campaigns through various online and offline channels. It is a multi-dimensional experience layered pleasantly to engage and entertain customers.
1- Brand activation goals
Do you want to gain new subscribers on the brand's website? Do you want to increase the total sale of the brand, store, shop, or website? Make it clear what is brand activation's goal is to decide how to plan objectives. Write your brand activation goals with technical metrics. To generate 5000 new local leads, for example, is a goal that requires some preparations, such as providing a way to communicate with these customers.
2- Understanding target audience values
Brand activation is an event designed to invest in customers to establish long-term relationships. People forget most of the daily brand impressions, and brand activation tries to make a difference using a surprising experience. Understanding target audience values is as important as the event's major theme for planning a successful brand activation campaign.
3- Use online branding tactics to provide a lasting brand experience
Digital branding campaigns help brands increase their local and global impressions beyond in-store or in-studio brand activation events. Online solutions are typically used to achieve more customers interested in the brand and its products on the internet and various kinds of social media networks. A product sampling campaign is a type of brand activation that does not require a physical store as far as there is a product sample that helps customers remember your brand.
4- Pop-up Store surprising campaigns
Suppose you have a big brand with a significant supply of products or services or have a local drink business. In that case, you can enjoy the advantages of experimental street marketing, for which you should also create a huge budget that, of course, returns a notable ROI. This type of brand activation is suitable for prestigious large brands with years of experience and distribution channels.
5- Online Product Sampling campaigns
Unlike traditional and physical brand activation campaigns, online product sampling campaigns are cost-effective, and they only spend their budget on return of investment. Peekage online product sampling services, for example, help brands to offer their products to large numbers of potential customers and generate total new leads only using product samples and online solutions.
Advantages of Brand Activation
Brand activations are useful to create loyal customer bases by providing unique expressions. Some advantages of brand activation in any type of it include:
Earning relevant customer data
In the universe of brand activation, data is the currency. Acquiring customer data, live comments, and feedback is invaluable to companies. Not only do brands gain an insight into their customers' minds, but they also reach their users through a multi-touch interaction, build memories, and shape experiences.
Tapping into new markets
Brand activation helps find new leads, followers, and customers by providing a unique brand experience.
Rebranding campaigns
Brand activation is also useful for effective rebranding campaigns in which brands try to change their previously known image. With sample distribution, brand activation transforms the business from an idea to a recommendable stage by providing a unique experience in the customer's home.
Growing customer bases
It effectively engages more people, and brands use it to grow customer bases.
Distinguishes between the brand and its competitors
Brand activation campaigns are profitable events, as they have surprising effects in engaging online users beyond official or in-store events. Usually, brands combine several surprising and valuable elements to provide a lasting experience for their target audience. So if you need social engagement and millions of online visits, you can simply try to do something nobody expects, and that's what some well-known, established brands do. They provide pleasant, entertaining events to communicate with their target audience in direct, face-to-face brand experiences.
Final Words
Conclusion paragraph: Overall, developing and implementing an effective brand activation strategy can be a great way to boost your company’s visibility and create lasting customer connections. By understanding the objectives of brand activation and selecting suitable techniques, you can craft an engaging and successful campaign that will bolster your bottom line.
