One of the most important – and most difficult – parts of planning a successful experiential marketing event is coming up with a unique idea. Experiential marketing is so common these days that many consumers are less than blown away by standard tabling or festival booths. While there are some types of activations that remain tried and true (such as handing out samples and having a celebrity available for photos), you need to do something really different if you want to stand out from your competitors.

Factory 360 employs several different strategies for coming up with unique event ideas. We start by getting to know as much as we can about your company. Our goal is to come up with an event that will really build on your brand’s truth.

What do you value as a company? What is your positioning statement, and how do your products or services differ from those offered by your competitors?

We also develop a very strong sense of what you hope to accomplish with your experiential marketing activation. We discuss goals, outcomes and analytics. We discuss your audience, including any target populations you’re hoping to reach (college students, affluent people, etc.). If you’ve ever done an experiential marketing event in the past, we talk about what worked well during that experience and what didn’t.

Now that we’ve gotten to know more about you and what you want to achieve with your experiential marketing event, we can build an experience that will fit within your mission, strategies and budget. All our staff and interns at Factory 360 work hard to stay abreast of what’s happening in the world of experiential marketing, so we have a good sense of what other companies are doing and what’s working. This allows us to avoid repeating what someone else is doing, but it can also be great fodder for new and interesting concepts. We can look at other people’s successful ideas and make them even better.

When it comes to planning your experiential marketing event, we brainstorm different possibilities for activations that will really catch consumers’ attention while still sticking within your brand culture. There are many resources available for creating unique experiential marketing activations. New and existing types of technology continue to impress consumers, so we try to work them in wherever we can. There are standard technologies like video and video games that can make a very positive impression at your event.

But activations don’t have to be lavish or expensive to be effective. To promote Turkish Airlines’ new direct flights from San Francisco to Istanbul, Factory 360 used binoculars and fit them with photos that provided individuals with a 360 degree view of the different destinations where the airline flies. This relatively simple campaign generated over 200,000 impressions for Turkish Airlines.

It also remains true that people like free food and stuff, so involving giveaways is never a bad idea. We try to think about ways to make those giveaways more interesting. During an experiential marketing activation for NJOY, the e-cigarette brand, we employed young people to distribute samples to millennials during the Coachella Music Festival. Samples were handed out in a non-intrusive manner in the event’s designated smoking areas. Monitors showed NJOY-branded content during the event so people had extra exposure to the company.

This campaign had great results. Overall we handed out over 100,000 samples to a highly-receptive audience and generated more than 500,000 social media impressions.

We may push you to think outside the box and consider something a little risqué for your company. Doing something consumers don’t expect is a great way to catch their attention. We’ll never suggest you do something dangerous, or something that might offend your existing staff and stakeholders. But one of the best ways to make yourself stand out in a crowded field is to do something really unique and different.

Getting the right people to staff your experiential marketing event can also make it seem unique and interesting to your consumers. Factory 360 has a talent recruitment arm that employs high-quality people of all ages and backgrounds to work for you at your event. If you’re hoping to market to a multicultural population, we can help you find people who speak different languages and share a culture with people in your target market. We also have a network of models who can staff events, which adds another exciting dimension.

Once Factory 360 has developed a plan for your experiential marketing activation, we present it to you for your feedback. We engage in some back and forth to make sure the plan fits perfectly within your goals and expectations. After that, we can begin preparations for execution. We like to say we “measure twice and cut once” when planning all activations. Our goal is to make your event as flawless and easy to run as possible.

That being said, it’s also important to note that Factory 360 employs people who are marketers first and execution specialists second. We always keep our focus on the fact that experiential marketing exists to help you build consumer familiarity, loyalty and interest in your product, with the end of goal of increasing your sales.

If you want to make sure your next event is unique, fun and impactful for your company, give Factory 360 a call. We’re excited to help you stand out in a crowded field.