The Importance of On-Site Activation

Event success

Activation marketing is a new methodology that brands can use to identify, focus on and create intentional experiences that drive the interactions that lead to high activity and increase active customers. This requires a new approach. The traditional marketing approach is channel-based: Companies use channel data to optimize channel performance. Activation marketing focuses on using customer data to optimize the entire customer experience across all channels and touchpoints. Traditional marketers send generic messages that drive customers to a more relevant experience. Activation marketers use AI to make the message relevant to each customer. Finally, traditional marketing is often confined to siloed communication that is separate from events or interactions from other sources. Activation marketing involves an omniscient perspective and uses real-time interactions to create the next best experience every time.

The traditional marketing growth flywheel consists of the following stages: awareness, acquisition and advocacy. This paradigm suggests that brands need to create awareness about their product and offering, acquire customers through performance marketing campaigns and then provide a good transactional experience that those customers will advocate for and tell their friends about. This approach is accurate, but I believe it's incomplete. It is missing a beneficial fourth dimension. The growth flywheel consists of four parts: awareness, acquisition, activation and advocacy. The new member of the group, activation, helps make advocacy happen. Activation is providing consistently relevant experiences to all acquired customers so that their experience is so intuitive and seamless that they become natural brand advocates.

In order to shift your marketing team to an activation marketing approach, you need the following things in place. First, you should work to understand your customer by unifying all of their data in an easily digestible format that marketers and other customer-facing teams can use. Second, you should make sure you can react to customers' real-time activity. For example, you can help customers select the best-fitting product and avoid drop-offs after they view a product by promoting various relevant alternatives. Or you can showcase other products from customers’ favorite brands or sellers. You can also give customers a reason to buy sooner by alerting them when prices drop for recently viewed or carted items or for products that match their category affinities.

Lastly, you should connect the entire customer experience so that each communication is omni-aware of every other communication and marketing teams can act in concert — not in competition — with each other. For example, you can help the customer service or support team promote cross-sells and upsells by providing easy access to transaction and browsing history, as well as recommendations tailored to each customer. For the email marketing team, you can pull recent customer activity from the mobile app or website into the platforms they work in so they can present relevant offers inside their email campaigns.

Consumers expect these experiences and will likely continue to reward brands that provide them with more activity, attention and ultimately more revenue. In fact, 2018 research from Epsilon and GBH Ventures (via McKinsey) found that 80% of respondents wanted personalization from retailers. This means that brands that ignore this trend may find themselves losing market share.

Written By Josh Francia

Former Forbes Councils Member