It’s something that marketers and influencers are talking about more and more – but what exactly is brand activation? Well, it’s a way of marketing a brand that seeks to create lasting impact on the customers it targets, through offering real-life experiences. It isn’t marketing in its purest form, but rather more a concept – like brand awareness.
It involves activities like advertising and campaigns to introduce or even reintroduce a brand to its core demographic and it actively encourages them to interact with it. Its ultimate goal is to create brand advocates from previously passive customers.
Let’s see how it works by looking at some of its key components. Understanding these points is crucial to making your brand a successful enterprise that will gain a dedicated following.
Getting to know a brand: Brand activation requires a clear understanding of what the goals of the brand are, its core values, and any unique selling points. This is the cornerstone of a successful launch.
Who is the core demographic?: Who are the brand’s target customers and what demographic do they fit into? It’s a good idea to conduct market research and chat with different groups about their preferences, behaviours, and needs. Once this information is understood, a brand activation strategy can often fall into place quite easily.
Interesting and engaging experience creation: Creating great content and interactive experiences to engage consumers with the brand is the next step. There are many ways this can be achieved from product launches, in-person events, or interactive digital campaigns on social media. The aim here is to make the brand stand out and create personal connections with the target demographic.
Utilising social media: Social media can’t be avoided in this day and age! It’s such a useful tool for brand activation and platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X, and TikTok are ideal to create influencer engagement with an audience, show off contact, and encourage people to interact and share their own experiences.
Being consistent in messaging: Consistency of messaging is key, and any brand activation efforts must align with the overall tone of the brand. It’s one of the best ways to build trust with your audience and customers. The best way to do this is with consistent marketing, graphics, visuals, and audio.
Gauging success: As brand activation is happening it’s important to measure KPIs to see how overall efforts are paying off. Evaluating website traffic, and looking at social media engagement, sales, or brand reviews is essential. Reviewing them regularly ensures that success can be monitored over time to see if any strategy changes are required.
Here are just a few of the marketing ideas that follow from using these key concepts:
Experiential marketing
The first of these is experiential marketing. It’s also sometimes known as engagement marketing or event marketing. This is a fantastic marketing strategy to use that focuses on events or experiences that allow consumers to make memories. Hiring a professional event agency such as weareeventpeople.co.uk makes all the difference for this form of marketing as they’ll get to know the brand and everything about it to tailor the experience to attendees.
This form of marketing relies on forging emotional connections between the brand and the customer and offers the chance to get great word-of-mouth marketing to other consumers.
Influencer marketing
It goes without saying that influencer marketing is something that every brand needs these days. It’s one of the most potent ways to connect a product to people. Influencers will grow their followings based on specific niches or interests – and they serve as the shop-front between the brand and their target demographic.
Influencer collaborations are used to amplify the message of a brand and potentially reach hundreds of thousands of new customers. Not only that, they provide an often more human touch to a brand – when they share the experiences they’ve had with a product or service which might encourage more new customers to come on board than from usual more traditional methods of advertising.
Digital Activation
Lastly, there’s digital brand activation. This is advertisement-led – and involves creating engaging online campaigns, fantastically slick websites, and even things like social media adverts and hashtag games. Brands can reach a huge global audience very quickly, this way.
Mobile apps and websites are the next level as they create engaging and immersive experiences for customers and it’s another way for a brand to reach a huge audience globally, in a short space of time.
Brand activation campaigns are the way forward to drive interest and client engagement.
