6 Experiential Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

Experiential marketing is commonly mislabeled and misinterpreted. Marketers may create a visually stimulating exhibit environment and call it "experiential," but they are often missing the mark.

An experiential event builds direct consumer engagement in a focused, branded environment. In order to produce the desired results of increased sales and brand loyalty, experiential marketing events must be emotional, relevant, memorable and interactive.

During a successful experiential marketing experience, the customer engages with key messages and walks away with a positive image of the brand and a desire to purchase from the company. At trade shows and events, marketers can achieve success by creating branded hubs, filled with engaging content, educational games and relevant information.

Below are six common experiential marketing mistakes that marketers suffer in their efforts. When planning an experiential marketing campaign, avoid these pitfalls:

1. Lack of control
Marketers can be so focused on producing content that delivers trade show results that they do not develop a clear plan for how attendees will interact with the content. How will people navigate from kiosk to kiosk? What is the underlying logic or flow to the event set up? The content will not stand on its own. To achieve engagement and brand loyalty, there needs to be a clear path to push users in the right direction and encourage a deeper level of interactivity. Gain control over the experience by building logic and flow into your content from day one.

2. Ineffective use of technology
While educational marketing tools like multi-touch walls, surface tables and iPads are integral to experiential marketing, it is dangerous to over use this technology or to use it ineffectively. Marketers need to understand their content and work with interactive experts who can apply technology to maximize their content. An example of maximizing content with technology is presenting more dynamic content on multi-touch screens, and presenting linear, text-heavy content in a straightforward document. When marketers understand how to leverage technology to maximize the content, they will create a better interaction with the audience.

3. Poor user experience
Usability is the highest priority in leveraging technology to create interactions. By concentrating on user interface and a positive user experience, marketers can be sure their content has a high level of usability. For a successful user interface, pay attention to how things are laid out on screen, keep menu items and actionable buttons visible and use standard navigation. In terms of user experience, there should be an elegant transition from one piece of information to the next and from station to station. Without a serious focus on usability, the content may be inaccessible and non-engaging.

4. Over-reliance on give-aways
With the exception of the heavily-regulated healthcare industry, it's common to see marketers using premium give-aways to create engagement at live events. For example, "Visit all of our kiosks and receive a goodie bag," or "Check-in to our booth and receive a $5 gift card." The problem with this approach, is that people are interacting with the brand for the wrong reasons. They will come and scan their badge at a couple of stations, then go to the counter to receive their premium. This kind of engagement doesn't have any lasting brand value. The goal of experiential marketing is to create content that is engaging by itself. A premium is just an add-on; once you've delivered an engaging experience a premium can add value on top of that.

5. Turning print ads into interactive
If you want to be successful with experiential marketing, then you have to get into a digital mindset. One big mistake that marketers make, is trying to adapt printed materials like advertisements and brochures into interactive experiences. A print design will never translate into interactive content, because it is flat and not designed for usability. It's not enough to add navigation, buttons and animation to a printed piece. You must work with  digital marketing experts who can translate the concept and messaging of print materials into totally new content, that uses a digital mindset and promotes usability.

6. Failure to measure results
Like any good marketing or advertising campaign, experiential campaigns generate valuable customer insights and results. Build data capture and reporting into every piece of interactive content. Measure the number of visits, visitor demographics and length of engagement. To determine whether customers engaged with your key messages, conduct an exit survey. Have someone standing near the exit of the booth, with an electronic survey asking the consumer how they felt during the experience, what their perception of the brand was prior to the experience, what it is now and whether they would recommend the product or brand to peers and colleagues.

Experiential marketing is a valuable live event tactic that can generate brand loyalty and sales. Don't be fooled by smoke and mirror marketing tactics that are labeled as "experiential." True experiential marketing is emotional, relevant, memorable and engaging and can do wonders for your brand.