Building brand awareness and cultivating lasting, personal connections to your target audience is what brand activations are all about. For both established and growing brands, brand activations are a great way to build relationships, awareness, and elevate your experiential marketing strategy.
What Is a Brand Activation?
Brand activations are immersive, consumer experiences that increase awareness and engagement. Activations come in many forms, ranging from in-person events to interactive digital marketing campaigns. It is a singular experience that helps elevate a brand in one specific instance rather than over a period of time.
The process of creating a well-rounded brand activation begins with gathering relevant consumer insights. This will make the experience more meaningful and bring a brand to life in a way that seems authentic and more relatable to the customer. Purposefully made for both existing customers and to attract new customers, activations turn an average marketing campaign into an engaging branded experience.
Using Brand Ambassadors In Live Activations
Brand activations can be even more successful when brands add ambassadors into the mix. Ambassadors function as personable, human extensions of a brand so that brand can expand outreach and create community more authentically. Rather than relying on traditional advertising methods, companies can utilize ambassadors to market through word of mouth. This strategy works as it is estimated that millennials are 115% more influenced by word of mouth than traditional advertising. With more and more consumers feeling overwhelmed by marketing efforts, brand activations offer a fresh perspective into any brand.
What better way to bring a sense of trust and reliability to your brand than by showcasing the people who live and breathe your brand? Brand ambassadors are not meant to replace certain aspects of your marketing campaign, but rather to enhance an existing idea through this activation of real, passionate customers.
If a brand activation involves any elements of field marketing or an immersive in-person experience, consider sending ambassadors to support the event. Encourage those ambassadors to create content about the brand on their own social media accounts, or allow a certain number of trusted ambassadors to host a “takeover” on your own company’s social channels. This way, customers can see that there are actual people who love and trust in your brand.
Using Brand Ambassadors In Digital Activations
Some brand activations take place in more of a passive manner, such as free trial campaigns or through branded merchandise. In this setting, ambassadors can be sent the items in advance with incentives to post on social media, wear the merchandise for a weekend, or simply share it with their friends in person as a way to reach customers outside company owned channels.
With people spending more time in their own homes, at-home brand experiences are increasing in popularity. Non-alcoholic spirits brand Seedlip recently launched a new series of virtual cocktail masterclasses to bring cocktails to life with the assistance of their brand ambassador, a cocktail connoisseur. Anybody could sign up to join the masterclass, those participants would be sent the necessary bottles of Seedlip and a list of ingredients to make the perfect cocktail. Not only did this help with bringing in a human connection between brand and customer, but it also offered a fun, engaging manner.
Brand activations help put a face to a brand. They increase exposure, create authenticity, and bring brands to life in the consumer’s world. Inviting ambassadors to assist with activations can mean even more exposure in a way that feels more natural for consumers.
