Remember when you had to explain what CRM stood for? If you’ve been in the marketing field for more than a few years, you will certainly remember all the buzz when marketing automation began to come online. Forrester now predicts that spending on marketing automation will reach $25.1 billion by 2023.
We are now seeing history repeat itself in the adoption trajectory of experiential marketing technology, but with the S-curve collapsed due to the acceleration of digital tech.
How can leaders in the cannabis industry effectively leverage this experiential marketing technology to create actionable insights, better predict customer pain, and unify their strategy around the consumer experience across channels? Keep reading to find out the strategies of best-in-class leaders at brands such as CannTrust, Spectrum Cannabis, and MedReleaf.
Consumer expectations are higher than ever before, and journeys are becoming increasingly complex across channels, devices and touchpoints.
To succeed, brands must now look at their marketing approach holistically in order to maximize results and align with where their customers are within their consumption journey.
Though the phrase "omni-channel" is a buzzword, it refers to a significant shift: marketers now need to provide a seamless experience, regardless of channel or device. Marketing leaders need to manage the consumer experience as one integrated approach: across traditional media, offline marketing, social, online, etc.
Many brands have a strong hold on how they measure traditional channels such as media, online advertising and even social. However, when it comes to non-traditional channels such as experiential, event and other forms of offline marketing, measurement often remains in the dark.
According to Adobe, only 6% of marketers are "extremely confident" in their ability to measure return on investment for offline marketing programs.
Cannabis brands that understand experiential marketing can more easily create a single line of sight around their customer experience. Enabling this omnichannel strategy is no longer an option—it's an imperative:
Fortunately, there are a host of new tools coming into focus that can provide a single line of sight into all kinds of innovative in-person activation events, from B2B/ medical conferences, to in-store experiential or events, to VIP functions.
When CRM, digital platforms and marketing automation first starting gaining traction, they were certainly useful but there was no way to measure how much.
There was no line of sight to track ROI or impressions for things like drip email campaigns, website engagement and the effectiveness of specific pieces of content. Those were the days before HubSpot’s Marketing Grader, before Oracle’s Marketing Cloud, and when Salesforce’s initial marketing tools were still known as ExactTarget.
Marketers exploring the possibilities of experiential marketing (XM) and live events are in the same situation right now. Directors and C-level execs know that these new channels are effective, but proving it to other stakeholders with data visualizations can be challenging. This is especially true in the cannabis and retail sector services sector, where events are often still measured with traditional metrics like attendance counts.
Driven by society’s accelerating connectivity and the market’s intensified competitive focus on customer sentiment, leading firms are demanding greater visibility into the effectiveness of all marketing campaigns. Experiential marketing, with its unique emphasis on face-to-face meetings and personal insights into purchase intent, requires a new set of tools and technology to deliver on its promise.
The following processes are used by best-in-class brand. They suggest actions you can initiate now to point you down the right path:
Customers glide effortlessly through a variety of digital and physical touchpoints throughout the day as they connect with brands in person, on their phones and in chat rooms. Managing the variety of experiences doesn’t have to add up to complexity. What matters most is a single source of truth about the customer, and the most logical way to get there is through a single line of sight on customer data.
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