Encouraging consumer engagement in today's hyper-competitive environment where every brand is vying for attention from distracted audiences can be challenging. You need to deliver a memorable experience from the get-go to match the excitement and high-touch nature of events so that you can build awareness and drive conversions.

Out-of-home (OOH) media, combined with experiential marketing strategies, can deliver a positive experience that engages all five senses to create a real-life encounter that can't be skipped or ignored. It provides advertisers the canvas to skillfully blend creative, media, and context in order to make a lasting impression with the consumer.

Experiential OOH Advertising For Effective Consumer Engagement
Here's how you can combine the power of experiential marketing with the scale of OOH advertising to deliver a memorable experience that builds awareness, resonates with your audience, and inspires action.

Think Outside of the Content Box
Experiential activations are 3-dimensional while OOH placements like wallscapes, digital screens, billboards, banners and wraps, can insert your brand into the audience's path as they go about their daily activities. From interactive displays and hologram projections to pop-up stores/exhibits and large-scale installations, there are many ways to surprise and delight your audience, so they'll literally stop in their tracks,  take notice and share their encounters on social media.

Even more, utilize brand ambassadors to engage with your audience, provide key campaign messaging and hand out take-aways. The longer consumers spend with your experience the more impact, awareness and recall they’ll take with them.

Design for Context and Environment
Insert your OOH ads into the audience's path by making them part of the environment and the context. Consider what the viewers are doing and feeling when they encounter your initiative. For example, are they strolling about or can they pause and interact with the content? What could be going through their minds, and how can you relate that to your event? Can you pull in elements from the environment to make it more contextually relevant?

Deliver a Cohesive & Shareable Experience
Experiential advertising should be an integral part of the entire user journey that starts from building awareness about your event to attending it. While the activation itself should capture attention, don't forget to deliver a cohesive customer journey to drive brand conversations and social shares. Incorporate your OOH campaign as part of an omnichannel experience to create a fluid offline/online experience that engages your audience's senses and gives them a taste of your activation.

Ensure your experience has an online presence and develop a way to track consumer-generated content of the event. Promote tagging the brand or utilizing a hashtag or geotag if they share images of the experience to personal social media accounts. Expand on the consumer content by seeding images and posts through the brand’s channels and spokespersons.

For example, this Brand Jordan takeover of the Prudential Plaza in Chicago during the World Basketball Festival was an epic event and the most “liked” brand post ever (at the time).

Get Hyperlocal
Non-traditional OOH opens up many opportunities for connecting with the audience as you deliver a highly localized experience surrounding an experiential activation or a standalone execution to make your message and brand assets contextually relevant -- don't just copy-and-paste online creatives to your OOH ad and call it a day! Show your local audience that you "get them" by making small but meaningful tweaks so your campaign speaks to the immediate context while maintaining a consistent brand experience.

Measure What Matters
The latest location intelligence and data science allow you to utilize highly granular consumer data to reach your audiences at the right place and at the right time to deliver the most relevant experience. You can measure the impact of the activations and OOH ads with advanced reporting to ascertain brand exposure, location & website visitations, sales lift, and placement performance, then use the insights to refine and optimize future campaigns.

How will you leverage experiential and non-traditional OOH to create a fun, interactive and memorable brand experience for your consumers? If you don’t know where to start, get in touch with your Billups managed and technology services team to learn more.