“Your brand is what people say about you when you are not in the room.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon.
Keeping that in mind, according to statistics, do you know people need less than 10 impressions to remember your brand?
Well, you can work your charm with the right brand activation strategies and efforts that are your perfect match to make a positive image among your audience and achieve other results.
In this blog post, we will lay it out for you, from the basics- what is brand activation and how to activate your brand to the most effective strategies and some brand examples of those who have been in your shoes.
So what are you waiting for? Start reading!
What is Brand Activation?
Brand activation is a campaign or event through which a brand can move customers and drive actions. This strategy helps spread brand awareness like fire, build strong customer relationships, increase sales, and boost interaction with the target niche.
If your brand aims to generate interest and encourage customers to act, then you need to take some action through activities that help you achieve these goals and more.
These activities can be exclusive sales, premium access to the collection, or running social media campaigns, which ultimately help you come closer to your target audience and goals.
By activating your brand, you can stand out from your competitors, establish a loyal customer base, and achieve results.
Whether through immersive events, influencer collaborations, or social media campaigns, brand activation is essential to any successful marketing strategy as it helps you lure attention and use it tactfully.
How Do You ‘Activate’ A Brand?
Activating a brand involves creating experiences and interactions that help consumers remember your brand and connect deeply to take some positive action.
Here are some strategies to activate a brand effectively:
Experiential Marketing
Strategize around engaging marketing, which requires your brand to offer attendees an immersive experience; ask them to participate in the live and engaging activities set up at events.
This type of marketing involves you setting up booths or activity screens where they show their interests and leave their answers.
This helps them understand and use the product and encourages them to take a step further by purchasing your product.
To make it more effective, you can set up a stage for your product with samples so your audience can check it out. Create an educational and informative stage but make it creative so that people feel eager and the excitement builds up.
Sampling Campaigns
When introducing your brand to potential customers, a sample campaign can effectively get their attention.
People love having freebies, which can help your brand introduce and attract potential new consumers as your long-term users.
However, it’s crucial to approach it in the right way. As a brand, avoid being too pushy with free stuff. Instead, opt for the right venues to offer samples, avoid too much marketing, and ask them for their reviews and opinions.
For in-person samples, choose events your target audience will likely attend. Request that they share photos on social media.
In-Store Brand Activation
Brand activation is a way to connect your brand with your audience. For example, if you own a store, you could organize an event where people can come and try your products.
This could be done at store openings or product launch events to give customers a premium and first-hand product tryout experience.
When people experience your brand in person, they are more likely to feel emotionally connected, leading to increased loyalty, advocacy, and a better understanding of what your brand stands for.
For instance, host a networking event activation gathering and invite your customers to interact with your team and learn more about your products. This can build stronger customer bonds and generate positive word-of-mouth, eventually leading to higher foot traffic.
Why is Brand Activation Essential?
After understanding what is brand activation? It’s time to move forward and understand the importance of brand activation with an example of a new beverage company launching a new line of healthy drinks.
To activate their brand, they can organize an immersive event where attendees can sample their products their newly launched drinks, and participate in interactive games.
Not only that, but this brand can also do the same in-store and give discounts or free drink packages to customers who participate in the activities.
As for marketing, the brand can do so through social media and influencer collaborations to reach the target and broader audience.
By creating this engaging experience, the company can successfully ignite interest among the customers and spread brand awareness as well as about their products, stand out from competitors, and encourage customers to try their drinks.
But when we talk about the importance of brand activation methods and strategies, remember that they offer long-term benefits, as all these efforts help your brand get a loyal customer base and increase sales over time.
Brand Activation Ideas
A meaningful and memorable brand activation strategy not only helps you effectively gain but also gives the attendees an unforgettable experience.
Here are some ideas you can include in your plan to improve it.
1. Surprise your audience
Surprise your clients when they least expect it with early sales, special discounts, premium collections, and giveaways, contests, freebies.
These surprising activities can catch your audience’s eyes, motivate them to participate, lead them to a memorable experience, and connect with your brand deeply with a long-lasting impression.
2. Show the newness of your products
Image Source – Apple
Use your brand activation strategy to highlight a new product launch or the latest features, as that can reignite the interest of your audience and lure them to take action.
Another way to display the uniqueness of your product is through product demonstrations, hands-on experiences, and your brand’s informative presentations to consumers.
3. Make your event participatory
As a brand, you can bring a touch of interaction to your events and gatherings by incorporating elements like contests, quizzes, Q&A polls, and more, giving your events an immersive feel and motivating people to participate.
Using a social wall, you can display your user-generated content, collaborative creativity, visually appealing live content, reviews, and positive feedback and build long-lasting bonds with event attendees.
4. Partner up in collaborations
I know that @carlsberg want me to tweet this – but I can't stop myself. Hats off pic.twitter.com/k7OCNv2Knk
— Stuart Aitken (@stuart_aitken) April 8, 2015
Joining forces with other brands can be a game changer and is a great brand activation idea; more importantly, it brings a new touch and complements your product. This helps build your company’s credibility and creates a win-win situation for both brands.
By collaborating, you can unlock benefits like wider reach, entrance into new niches and markets, and doubled brand and product promotion.
5. Highlight Your Messaging
When consumers want to buy products or take services from any company, they want to know that their chosen brand has values and cares about social responsibility. For example, people check if the brand they purchase from is cruelty-free.
This helps build consumer trust and can improve your brand’s image. So, don’t be afraid to promote your brand’s values and social responsibility, as such initiatives can take you one step closer to your aims.
Brand Activation Strategy
Here is a breakdown of the process you must go through while setting up your brand activation strategy; go further to discover them yourself.
1. Set Clear Brand Values
To start familiarizing your audience with your brand and turn them into loyal customers, you must start by clarifying your brand values and mission.
Simply stating your uniqueness to your customers will help you differentiate yourself from competitors. This includes marketing what your brand offers that differs from others in the market.
This helps the buyers understand your brand and make an informed decision, connecting better with you.
2. Define Your Audience
Defining the audience is the next step. Understanding your audience is crucial for effectively tailoring your brand activation efforts.
You need to know their details, such as interests, preferences, dislikes, demographics, and more, as this will help in marketing and achieving your goals.
Focusing on customers is also helpful when you set your goals and strategies to achieve them.
3. Make A SWOT Analysis
A SWOT analysis is a way to look at your brand as it helps dig deeper by understanding the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
Figure out what you’re good at to help you achieve your goals, what you’re not so good at and so avoid them, what opportunities you have in the market, and what things might threaten your success.
It’s like a checklist to help you determine what you need to work on to improve your brand.
4. Try Out Multiple Strategies
When interacting and working on customer engagement as a brand, you must explore different social media marketing campaigns and tactics like collaborating with content creators, experiential or sampling marketing, and more.
You can later tailor them or go with the one that fits you best and suits the preferences and interests of your niche audience.
To achieve goals from your brand activation, you must check out the right social media strategy that can bring more followers and motivate them enough to take purchase actions.
5. Think About Management
When setting strategies to reach any goal, the first and foremost step is to be sure that your brand can manage the tasks; saying that, you must check with your team and keep everyone on the same page.
By considering the management of your brand activation plan, you can ensure that your efforts are practical and can be efficiently achieved by your team.
It’s crucial to ensure you have a clear plan for executing it. This will help you stay on track and ensure that. You can give out what you promised your brand to achieve and your customers to be delivered.
Types of Brand Activation
The brand activation strategy you choose to go with will bring in results and define the outcomes.
The choice of which type to use often depends on your brand’s objectives, target audience, and the nature of your products or services.
So, we have carefully listed some methods that you can decide to take on, read, and find what works for you.
1. Brand Activation Events
Brand activation events are one way to bring the attention of new customers to your brand. They serve as a platform for introducing and promoting a brand and product.
These events can be product launches, shows, or seminars, but you can add a touch of excitement to them by adding some games and activities.
The main objective is to showcase the brand’s offerings, increase interaction, and create a buzz.
2. Digital Campaigns
Digital brand activation campaigns are a cost-effective way to engage with consumers online.
These campaigns involve various techniques, like email marketing, online advertising, website content, and many more, giving you an edge over the technology.
The beauty of digital campaigns is that they can be highly targeted, enabling you to reach your niche audience anywhere in the world.
3. Virtual Interactive Events
Virtual events have become a popular way to connect with people. Virtual brand activation events are considered adequate and result-driven as they help people enjoy and be a part of online.
These events come in many forms in virtual spaces, from webinars and virtual trade shows to live streaming and online workshops. You can use short-form video content to catch the eye of your attendees without taking too much of their time.
Not only that, but they can help you increase audience engagement and participation, creating an immersive experience that can be enjoyed anywhere in the world.
4. Promotions
A store offering a 20% discount on all items for a limited time is an example of a promotion. This promotion creates a sense of urgency among consumers to purchase before the discount expires.
Promotion discounts can also help you increase your sales, as this tactic can lure people to double their purchases and help you clear out the collection.
Similarly, stores can offer special deals or coupons during the break season to attract customers and increase sales, which can work wonders with adequately planned and executed holiday marketing.
5. Social Media Contests
Social media contests are like virtual games in the form of contests and giveaway campaigns that can be started on social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
One such example of this type of brand activation strategy is brands asking their followers to tag a friend in the comment section of their post or share a story about the brand and more.
These contests encourage users to engage, bring in new followers, help the brand raise awareness, build stronger relationships, and create more content about the brand and its products.
You can also showcase your social media feed on your web pages, events, and campaigns to attract eyes and up your conversion rate.
How to Measure Brand Activation?
Measuring the effectiveness of brand activation is essential to analyze the outcomes of your marketing and execution.
Establishing clear objectives is the first step, as it helps us know what we aim for and how much of it is achieved.
The next step is to employ an analytics tool that helps gather data and learn where we stand in our process. Additionally, collecting direct feedback from your audience can provide valuable qualitative insights.
This step is most important as we can learn where we lacked effort and where we need to focus if we need to shift to another strategy or incorporate new techniques.
Continuously adjust your strategies and benchmark against your competitors to refine your brand activation efforts to perform better in the future.
In the next section, we’ve put together some interesting, and by reading brand activation examples, you can go through and see for yourself the worth of this strategy.
Brand Activation Examples
1. Revolve
Revolve took inspiration from experiential brand activation and hosted a campaign in collaboration with influencers. With these celebrities, the brand started a tour involving exciting activities, which added to the buzz and gave them a memorable experience.
2. Foster’s No Worries Motel
Source – Ads of the world
In an attempt to leave an impactful and long-lasting impression in people’s minds, Foster set up unique motels in collaboration with AirBnB made inside shipping tanks in proximity to one of the country music festivals.
3. GoGo SqueeZ: Goodness Machine
Source – Stroller in the City
GoGo SqueeZ went along with automated machines and gained the attention of their targeted customers, be they children or adults. They set up large applesauce machines, allowing people to take regular applesauce products from it. But they also gave a few lucky customers a year’s supply, which led to excitement among others.
4. Vitaminwater
Source – Zoominfo
Just like these brands, Vitaminwater also worked on generating leads and marketing their products. To attract more people, they used the most famous WayHome Music Festival to show their vibrant and colorful misting station, which helped those intolerant to heat cool down.
5. CALM | Project 84
The charity organization Calm created 84 sculptures of life-size men who took their own lives, placing them on one of the UK’s top networking buildings they partnered with. They broadcasted their stories and talked about the prevention of suicide, hence spreading awareness of the cause. Not only this, but they petitioned about the same and asked the government to take severe action regarding the same.
How Tagbox Helps in Brand Activation?
Taggbox is your go-to tool when you are planning a brand activation campaign.
It caters to multiple services, such as aggregating various social media channels and managing content, moderating and customizing feeds, seamless integration, and publishing.
Not only that, but Tagbox also offers solutions such as social walls, User-generated content aggregation rights management, and more to make your work smooth, saving a ton of your time and other resources.
Whether it’s your corporate conference, virtual meeting, product launch event, in-store party, digital advertising, or social media campaign you are working on, Tagbox can help you achieve your goals efficiently.
Brand Activation Takeaways
As we conclude and part ways, we can say that whether it is about engaging your audience, keeping them in touch, spreading the brand name, and increasing sales, brand activation is an all-in-one strategy that can help you boost your brand.
So, to level up your brand, start strategizing around brand activation efforts
