When considering ways to activate your brand, the best place to start is from the vantage point of your consumer. What will grab their interest? What will make them smile? What will leave a lasting impression on them? Coming back from a long stretch of time where most people avoided interacting as groups, there is an eagerness for experience and connection.
Bring Your Brand to Life
Brand activation is all about bringing your brand to life through interactive and immersive experiences. It's not just about showcasing your products or services; it's about creating a unique experience that resonates with your audience and encourages them to act. It's about taking your company's identity - it's name, look and feel, messaging, and product - and translating it into a physical and digital brand expression. Some excellent examples of physical brand activations can include mobile showrooms, food trucks, sampling carts, stunts, street teams, trade show booths, and exhibits.
Understand Your Goals
At the outset, understanding the goals for your brand investment is paramount. Whether it is for general brand awareness, consumer sign ups, sampling an amazing product, or all the above, intention is important. Going into your activation strategy with overarching goals will help you to drill down more detailed KPIs such as brand awareness, retail sales lift, social media amplification, and consumer conversions.
Track engagement, conversions and customer satisfaction to build a loyal customer base who is more likely to recommend your brand to others. Measure engagement by tracking the number of interactions your brand activation campaign generates, including likes, shares and overall reach. Increased engagement builds loyal customers who are more likely to convert which is measured by tracking the number of people who take action as a result of your campaigns. The gathered feedback will allow you to measure customer satisfaction and retargeting, if needed.
Be Real About Your Investment
Budget parameters will help reign in your team's ideas. Grassroots “boots on the ground” activations can be very impactful on a minimal budget especially if the brand ambassadors are engaging and distributing samples for product trials or collateral with a call to action. Considering whether your brand will activate once during the budget year or on multiple events will determine whether it makes sense to lease versus buy brand activation assets.
For example, equipment such as vehicles can be purchased, customized and repurposed for multiple activations in addition to being utilized as mobile billboards throughout the year. On other occasions, it may be more cost effective to rent or lease on a project basis.
Knowing which markets are important to your brand and consumers will develop the activation road map. If visiting multiple markets is part of your strategy, a mobile activation may be the right track to take. Permitting, travel times between markets, and the out of home (OOH) opportunity for your vehicle while it is on the road are just a few things to consider when trying to manage your brand investment.
We'll Take It From Here
Working with a trusted partner, like Kodi Collective, that understands the nuances of brand activations will help your team focus on their core strengths of brand promotion and customer acquisition. We can be an experienced resource for your brand activation design, fabrication and installation, brand ambassador recruitment, permitting logistics, and project management. Kodi Collective can help you capitalize on opportunities with new and existing customers to build brand affinity, influence their networks, and amplify your brand organically.
