To Win Over (And Keep) Consumers, You Need To Enhance Experiential With Digital

Have you ever thought negatively about a brand for getting your name wrong? You’re not alone.

User experience (UX) is getting more and more important these days now that consumers have so many different ways to interact with your brand. A strong consumer experience has been shown to increase spend by 140 percent compared to those who had the poorest experiences.

However, many companies are struggling to identify how they can provide the best consumer journey. In doing so, they often overlook the most important aspect: the digital experience.

The digital path for a consumer includes the brand interaction that a consumer goes through a computer, tablet, smartphone or other devices. This could mean anything along the consumer journey, including researching your company or product online, finding your location, using a mobile app to chat with your consumer service, etc.

Enhancing the Consumer Experience with Digital

The factors that affect a consumer's experience are much different with digital than they are in a physical setting. Online consumers want to have a seamless and easy experience without any hiccups. For example, one study found that a 10-second wait for a page to load can make 50 percent of consumers give up on a purchase.

Consumers won’t think twice about moving onto a competitor if you fail to provide an outstanding experience. According to Forrester, 77% of consumers have chosen, recommended, or paid more for a brand that provides a personalized service or experience.

Integrating digital is key to providing a superior consumer experience, and as a result, grow the reach of your event and business. Last year, the top five channels for marketing spend were email, social, online, display and retargeting, mobile and search. Check out some of the ways that digital can help enhance your live marketing.

Better Targeting

Digital marketing works because it helps you better target your audience. Email and marketing automation puts your message in front of the right people at the right time. The result? Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads, according to Demand Gen Report.

Additionally, a smart social media strategy can help you grow awareness of your brand and generate buzz. By spending as little as six hours per week, 66% of marketers see lead generation benefits with social media. All of these digital efforts help you find the right people and attain better ROI on your marketing efforts.

Cashless Payments

Going digital at live marketing events can help you manage payments in a way that makes for quick and easy purchases. Attendees don't have to worry about carrying around cash or losing their wallets. It's an added element of convenience and security that will benefit everyone. Research shows that fans spend up to 20% more onsite when using cashless payments, such as RFID wristbands.

Brand Power

As digital becomes a bigger and bigger part of our daily lives, marketing organizers have to constantly find new and innovative ways to connect brands with event audiences. Live tweeting is the norm at events now, and real-time sharing on a variety of networks is one of the best ways to boost the power of your brand.

Studies have shown that combining social media and event marketing year-round boosts clickthrough by 236%. Clearly, leveraging social media can connect your brand to a huge online audience and create an instant digital connection between them.

Data Analysis

Using digital, a brand can also use data from an event app in order to come up with customized communications after the event. That way, you are getting the power of the event itself as well as the power of being able to stay in continued contact with consumers. Best-in-class marketers are using big data to:

Better understand their consumers

75% of consumers are more likely to buy from a retailer that recognizes them by name, recommends options based on past purchases or knows their purchase history (Accenture).  

Tailor content and communication

54% of consumers are prevented from engaging more often because brands send them too much irrelevant content (Marketo).

Create more relevant experiences

High performers are 4.2 times more likely to be satisfied with their ability to leverage consumer data to create more relevant experiences (Salesforce).

There is a reason why one-third of CMOs expect to set aside 21 to 50 percent of their budgets for brand experiences this year, according to the 2017 Freeman Global Brand Experience Study. Get on board with a digital plan for your live marketing events so you can start collecting insights and make smarter, data-driven decisions that deliver consumers the kind of experience they are looking for.