Marketing is more than digital efforts with hard measurable outcomes. While digital is still king in many ways, brands are turning to experiential marketing strategies more than ever to bring in new customers and retain existing ones. Hubspot’s Marketing Industry Trends Report for 2023 found that 29% of the 1,000+ global companies surveyed used experiential marketing, with 83% planning to invest the same or more in the strategy. What’s more, over half of those marketers claimed that experiential marketing was one of the most effective tactics in their arsenal.

Unsurprisingly, no one does this better than Disney. (Making magic is their business, after all.) Disneyland and Disney World are fully immersive brand experiences themed around Disney products (movies, shows and characters) that are constantly changing to incorporate new trends, events and innovative ways to surprise and delight consumers with every visit. The entire time you’re at a Disney park, show or even in a local Disney store, you are experiencing the brand and building brand affinity. It’s an amazingly effective strategy and part of why Disney continues to be a giant.

But for small to midsize businesses, experiential marketing can feel like a tactic that’s out of reach. How can you create effective, memorable customer brand experiences without a whole events team or a big budget or reach like Walt? Let’s talk about it. 

What is experiential marketing?

Experiential marketing, or experience marketing, is creating opportunities for customers to engage with the brand as a method of promoting a brand message or building affinity. 

Kiely Kuligowski for Business News Daily writes, “In traditional marketing, consumers are regarded as passive receivers of a company’s message. In experiential marketing, a brand involves the consumer directly and often offers a window into the evolution of an advertising campaign.”

Experiential marketing can create awareness of your message, build brand affinity, or even generate new leads.

Examples of tactics in this category include things like:

• Live events or pop-ups (like North Face’s pop up shops across China)
• Sponsored events/activations at events or conferences (like Cheetos’ booth at SXSW)
• Interactive outdoor or digital ads (like this traveling, immersive light show promoting Stranger Things season 4)

And other unique experiences relevant to the brand or designed to bring together brand loyalists and potential new customers.

How Disney does experiential

For experiential marketing to be successful, consumers shouldn’t feel like they’re being sold to. Instead, they should feel like they’re being invited in. 

For Disney, the key to this, and really all of their marketing success, is in the storytelling. Every product is an extension of the stories; every experience is an opportunity for consumers to become part of the stories. 

You don’t have to be a media company to tell compelling stories about your brand. Just apply some of Disney’s ingredients to create an experiential marketing strategy:

1. Tell a unique and compelling story
2. Surprise and delight
3. Commit and go bold
4. Customize and personalize

Building your experiential marketing strategy

As you think about what experiences might be fitting to tell the story of your brand and engage your customers, run it through the filter of Disney’s four ingredients. 

Tell a unique and compelling story

What types of experiences are fitting to your brand industry, core values and key differentiators? How can you tell a story that stands out among the competition? What parts of your story invite immersion or could influence the customer experience? For Disney, one example of this is the live characters in the Disney parks who remain fully in character for every interaction.

Surprise and delight

How can you connect with your audience in unexpected ways? If your customers show up to your store, your site, your social media page… how might you create interactions or opportunities for them to be pleasantly surprised? This is the extra touches or details Disney adds to their resort rooms, restaurants, ride lines and stores – like decor or a shrub in the shape of Mickey’s head. Outside Disney, this looks like the Doubletree’s check-in cookie, an experience and tradition that increased the hotel chain’s positive word of mouth. 

Commit and go bold

Experiential marketing is best when paired with digital efforts. With this type of marketing, the message can sometimes be implicit or subdued in favor of the user experience, so pairing it with a more direct message (like through a digital ad or commercial) can help hammer home the call to action. A great example outside of Disney for this is the #LikeaGirl campaign from Always in 2014, which took a powerful commercial, combined it with a major media buy (hey Super Bowl) and connected it to live activations and influencer and user generated content campaigns on social.

Customize and personalize

We typically think of customization and personalization as best practice for digital marketing, but it applies to experiential tactics, too. The easiest thing? Call people by their names. At Disney, a cast member may welcome you by name when they scan you into the park. Or you may see your name written on a white board or screen in your hotel room, similar to JetBlue’s in flight welcome message. 

Getting Starting: dos and don’ts of experiential marketing

Creating memorable brand experiences that lead to an increased word of mouth is the ultimate goal for any experiential marketing campaign. But making magic requires work. When planning your unique brand experience, there are a few tips to remember:

DO invite new customers in, while including nods to your loyalists

DON’T assume everyone knows about your brand or make it too niche

DO prioritize the story and the experience over the sale. It sounds counter-intuitive, but this is a long game.

DON’T get overly salesly. You’ll disrupt the immersion if you are too eager to close.

DO embrace a theme or central message that’s relevant to your brand.

DON’T choose a random idea or topic based on trends that isn’t connected to your product, service or brand tone.

DO engage your employees or staff in building the strategy

DON’T create an experience that is counter to customer service your audience may receive once they buy in

DO think about evoking emotion or playing on nostalgia

DON’T get too far from your brand message for the sake of being controversial or “viral”

DO combine experiential marketing with other tactics.

DON’T measure experiential marketing based on KPIs that can’t be clearly defined or measured.