As more consumer marketers shift budgets away from traditional, paid media to newer channels like social, mobile and other digital media opportunities, events and sponsorships, along with other forms of experiential marketing and promotions are getting a digital makeover and as a result, delivering significant brand and sales benefits.

The shift from paid advertising to more promotional forms of marketing is reflective of the greater emphasis marketers are now placing on activating their brands as opposed to building their brands. Although consumers have always been more influenced by what friends and peers say about a product or service than a brand’s marketing messages, until fairly recently, the brand-controlled, traditional mass media advertising and marketing message approach worked. The internet and “always on, always connected” devices have provided a mass media platform for consumer-generated reviews, ratings, comments, likes and dislikes to be distributed to the world. And, this has fundamentally changed how consumers discover, compare, shop and buy a whole range of product and services (for more info on this issue, see “Branding in the Digital Age: You’re Spending All Your Money in the Wrong Places”, McKinsey Quarterly, The Consumer Decision Journey and Google’s report: The Zero Moment of Truth).

In order to succeed, it become critical for brands to be a part of the conversation. To do this, you have to engineer experiences which inform,  entertain and delight. You have to create social conversational capital. Traditional advertising and marketing approaches, coming from the brand, lack both the credibility and appeal to do so. Other than Super Bowl or industry networking events or trade publications, when was the last time you actually heard consumers discussing how great an ad was and why?

Because experiential marketing activities such as promotions, events, sponsorships and in-store activities are more active and interactive in nature, they lend themselves particularly well to being objects of social conversational capital when properly enhanced with social media and other digital tools, content and connections .

It requires brand marketers aiming beyond typical objectives such as reach and loyalty, going deeper in exploring ways to create value for consumers to drive specific behavior and perceptual changes. When properly designed and orchestrated, experiential marketing efforts that blend offline and online engagement offer the prospect of creating deeper layers of consumer relationships, content and conversations. This results in improved metrics like reductions in marketing expense, enhanced brand perception, willingness to recommend and other key brand health indicators…and ultimately better sales results.

To borrow from a concept familiar to war planning; integrating online to your offline promotional and event activities is like adding air support to your ground troops efforts. With this in mind, we’d like to share some ideas and examples to help you get better results by amplifying your offline marketing engagements online.

Five Steps to Better Event, Sponsorship and Promotion Integration with Social Media, Mobile and other Digital Channels

1. Start at the End. Sadly, a lot of marketers aren’t thinking through what exactly they want to accomplish with the experiential or promotional activities. We’re finding that to be the case in a bench marking survey we’re currently conducting with the Promotion Marketing Association (PMA). If you haven’t taken it yet, we invite you to participate here.

Our findings to date are consistent with other surveys we’ve seen. Why is this? It may be because most marketers spend the biggest portion of their event marketing budgets on trade shows, which leads us to believe they are  seen as more of a tactical than a brand-building effort in spite of what they say. In our survey, 52% of brand marketers view experiential as a brand building activity. Yet, when asked how they measured it, they applied metrics that were more tactical in nature. Whatever your objectives, be clear about them and prioritize them.

2. Plan using the C’s of Conversational Capital…One of Which is NOT Campaign. Most consumer brand marketers still cling to the vestiges of the campaign-like planning when it comes to their events, sponsorships and promotions. “We create. We place. We execute. We are done.” Ah, not really.

Marketing in the social age is more of an iterative process. And, it’s all about the Content, Community and Connections that foster conversations. This has little to do with ad units or PR messages because if you don’t have something to talk about, no one will. Brainstorm all the forms of content that could be interesting to your audience.

What communities are they participating in? Don’t just look at the obvious ones like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or YouTube. There might be very interesting opportunities to activate grass roots communities via Meet Up or other forms of vertical interest social communities. Meet Up has 7 million members in the U.S. that participate in a variety of groups based on shared interests…everything imaginable. How might you leverage opportunities like this?

Using Connections also means keeping abreast of all the new tools and technologies that can connect you to your audience. This is a full-time job and not for the faint of heart. Getting the help of a professional who focuses on these areas can help you out.

3. Think Through the Before, During and After of your Experience. Using the Three C’s of Social Capital above, orient them into “before”, “during” and “after” buckets. What takes place before your event? How do you build buzz in advance? What can you do during the event to not only provide deeper levels of engagement at the experience but also have that engagement amplify into online content and connections, reaching individuals who can’t attend in person? How are you going to follow up with all the leads you generate with the activity? How do they get integrated into your CRM system? What happens after your event to carry to core aspects of the experience through to their next, logical place?

4. Think Multi-Channel and That Means Mobile! Rarely does a consumer use one source or one device to gather their information now but if they do, it’s going to be a smart phone.

We are multi-media multi-taskers. This can be a bit daunting for those of us planning marketing programs. There are so many choices. And new ones come about every week. Google+ was announced at the first of July and it already has over 20 million users sharing over 1 billion pieces of content a day. Should it figure into your experiential promotion strategy? Yep.

We briefly touched on Connections in our second step (Three C’s of Social Conversational Capital). But, addition emphasis should be given to this one issue…over half of all internet access in the U.S. is right now occurring on mobile devices. Shouldn’t mobile be carefully considered as a component of your event strategy? In a recent survey by Chief Marketer, only 18.4% of marketers have studied their consumers mobile habits directly and have a clear picture of their mobile engagement. We can tell you this-it’s more than you think.

By way of recent example, OceanSpray is currently conducting a promotion that combines live events, QR codes on brand ambassador shirts and a whole layer of content and consumer engagement.

If you’d like more info on mobile techniques, check out this Hubspot article for a helpful glossary of mobile marketing concepts and terms.

5. Involve your audience. Part of the problem the marketing industry is scrambling to correct is that it remained a spectator sport when the world became participatory.  When everyone can and does create content of one form or another you have several choices as a marketers:

• You can ignore it or deny that it’s happening
• You can be afraid of it and run from it
• You can try to use the new channels based on the old approach
• You can embrace it and harness it to your betterment

It’s surprising how many brands opt for one of the first three options. All of these are wrong-headed at best and dangerous to your brand at worst.

Our obvious recommendation is to embrace your audience and invite them to become a vital part of your marketing mix. But, involving your audience is not without it’s pitfalls. You may not always like what they have to say out in the open. Yet, if you’re patient and don”t view it as an existential threat, listening and reacting positively to even negative content can be a good thing.

When the audience embraces your idea as their own, that’s when things take off and become more than you could have ever hoped for. Just ask the Old Spice brand manager what the viral video sensation Old Spice Guy has done for their brand.

What approaches do you have for amplifying your experiential and event marketing and promotions online?