A brand activation is one of the sure-fire ways to drive consumer engagement and loyalty. However, finding the right strategy can be challenging. Here, we discuss how a digital photo booth could be the immersive experience you need to activate your audience.
What Is a Brand Activation?
While traditional marketing utilizes billboards and digital advertising uses optimized content to reach its audience, these tools don’t give customers real-time interactions with a brand. By contrast, brand activation involves businesses using branded experiences to directly interact with their customer base to spur them into brand engagement. As a marketing strategy, it focuses on using immersive campaigns to increase brand awareness in a positive way, drive client loyalty, and boost sales.
However, while the customer taking action is crucial to brand activation, it’s vital to note that brand activation strategies primarily focus on creating a personal relationship with the consumer, hence the need for personal interaction.
Digital brand activation involves using digital marketing tools and techniques to drive direct interaction between a brand and its consumer base. In digital brand activation, all forms of online marketing tools come into play, including social media and video marketing.
Building a Brand Activation Strategy Using a Photo Booth
Brand activation photo booths are among the most popular brand activation strategies used today. They’re easy to incorporate into any branded campaign/experience and appeal to today’s digital audience. Everyone loves photographs, and video or photo booths make the whole picture-taking experience even cooler, using features like Snapchat-style lenses, customized images, and unique photo experiences and outputs guests cannot recreate on their own.
When guests post those photos on social media after the event, they share their great experiences with your brand with others, and thus photo booths become an extremely effective digital activation strategy.
Furthermore, digital photo booth campaigns leave a lasting positive impression on customers at a branded event as it is an immersive experience. This perception could be the most significant factor in influencing customers to take the next step in their brand journey. Briefly, we’ll look at some of the different methods of brand activation and how you can use them for a photo booth activation campaign:
Experiential Marketing
Experiential marketing is the most popular form of brand activation. It majorly involves branded events that enable customers to have hands-on interactions with a brand, product line, objectives, and core values.
Use a Photo Booth to Connect with Your Guests Emotionally
These brand-centric events give consumers an experience that engages with them on an emotional level and influences their decision to engage the business. Businesses can leverage digital photo booths to create these immersive experiences for their audience. For example, a fashion brand could organize a themed gala where guests can take pictures of their attire in a unique branded photo booth with a custom set that matches the gala’s theme. As such, they get to dress glamorously for one exciting evening while also creating lasting memories of the event through photographs.
Digital Marketing & Photo Booths
In today’s digital world, digital marketing is a crucial part of every advertising strategy. It involves interacting with a business’ customer base using online tools and platforms. But how does this strategy work with a digital photo booth? It’s quite simple; brands can customize pictures taken during a photo booth activation campaign with any branding or message the company is looking to push. This could be the business’ logo, name, and hashtag, but you could also choose to place guests in their own custom advertisement or scene, transporting them into the world of the brand. For example, with a greenscreen, guests can feel like characters in their favorite TV show!
After the activation experience, participants share their photographs on social media platforms, thus advertising the company across the digital space. Content shared across social media from brand-centric events can influence online audiences toward patronizing a brand.
Product Sampling Campaigns
Businesses primarily use product sampling campaigns to roll out new merchandise. Customers at these events get to try out the latest product lines for free. Brands can incorporate digital photo booths into these campaigns as well. For example, they could attach giveaways and free trials of the new product line to customers who participate in the photo booth. Tech companies are an example of businesses that could leverage this strategy.
What Is the Process of Brand Activation?
Like every other marketing strategy, brand activation must be a well-planned process in order to be an effective campaign. Below are some of the crucial steps to take to get the most out of brand activation:
Know Your Objectives
You have to be specific about what you want to achieve to enable you to get the best out of your brand activation campaign. A clear understanding of your goals will help you organize your campaign to fit your objectives.
For a digital photo booth, you could decide if your mission is to increase brand awareness or get a new product line out. This will help you decide which brand activation strategy to use.
Understand Your Audience
As a brand, you must know what appeals to your consumer base to serve them better. When planning a brand marketing campaign, this understanding of your customers’ wants gives you insight into organizing your event to fit them. This factor is why a brand-centric photo booth is one of the best brand activation strategies to use. It appeals to today’s digital audience that loves taking pictures. If you want to reach a new crowd of millennials and Gen Z customers, then a photo booth is your best bet.
Build Around a Budget
Budgeting is a crucial aspect of every marketing strategy. You want to minimize cost while also getting the most out of your campaign. A digital photo booth is also useful in this regard. It’s relatively cheap to set up and get running, in comparison to the overall campaign budget, and it’ll provide the immersive experience your customers are seeking at a budget-friendly price.
Maximize Social Media
Social media content is effective in increasing brand awareness and engagement. As such, ensure you adequately utilize all available social media platforms to interact with your audience throughout your campaign. For example, suppose you’re rolling out a new product and using a brand-centric photo booth experience to market it. In that case, you can share information about the merchandise and the free trials for customers who participate in the campaign beforehand. After the event, you can also share some of the participants’ photographs on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Encourage guests to share their content from your branded experience as well, and offer incentives for those that do.
Measuring Brand Activation ROI
In brand activation, ROI is a tricky thing to measure. However, the key is first to know your objectives before kick-starting your strategy. Knowing what you want to achieve can help you monitor some key performance indicators (KPIs) during and after the campaign.
For example, if your photo booth activation campaign’s goal is brand awareness, a full custom data capture can be run, gathering the information you’ll need during the activation.
And after the event, you can track certain relevant information, like the amount of content shared from the event. This metric is why you should have a hashtag for your event. You can also monitor the number of interactions you’re getting on the shared content and the number of followers on your social media due to these conversations. Many photo activations can also integrate Google Analytic tracking codes to get real-time data for a deeper dive into metrics.
On the other hand, if your objective is generating conversions, then the number of email sign-ups you received during and after the photo booth campaign is one of the KPIs you can track. You can also use other key performance indicators to measure the ROI on your brand activation strategy, depending on what you aim to achieve.
The Bottom Line
So, you’re now excited to get to work on embarking on a brand activation campaign involving a photo booth, but where should you start? Give us at Studio Z a try! We’re far more than just a photo booth company; we offer a number of complementary services, such as the ROI measuring tools and brand-immersion elements discussed above. We have everything you’ll need to make your brand activation a glowing success. Tell us about your event so we can get started!
At Studio Z, we know a thing or two about photo and video activations. We have a wide array of options to suit your next event, brand activation, conference, expo, etc. If we don’t currently offer it, we can create it. Photographers and event marketers at heart, we are ready for the challenge. Reach out and start the conversation.
