Brand activations work. The data proves it.
More than 90% of consumers say they're more likely to buy after attending an activation. Forty percent report feeling more loyal to the brand afterward.
That's not marketing spin. That's measurable impact.
What Brand Activations Actually Are
A brand activation is an experience, event, or interaction designed to generate brand awareness and engagement with your target audience.
The real goal? Forge a lasting emotional connection between your brand and your ideal customers.
Brand activations immerse consumers in your brand's world. They create opportunities for meaningful engagement that translates into long-term loyalty. This includes experiential marketing, sampling campaigns, in-store events, trade shows, and other live experiences.
These aren't ongoing brand strategy. They're individual events or campaigns. What they lack in repetition, they make up for in intensity.
Brand activations forge connections through memorable, positive firsthand experiences that resonate emotionally. This is high-touch, deep-connection marketing, and pulling it off successfully requires a specialized combination of skills, experience, connections, and creative talent.
What Brand Activation Agencies Actually Do
Most people think activation agencies are just project managers. Detail-oriented planners who handle logistics while someone else does the creative work.
That's only part of the picture.
A brand activation agency is an assemblage of seasoned creatives, technicians, and strategists equipped to handle every aspect of conceptualizing, planning, drafting, crafting, and executing an event. They work with clients to identify the right approach, locations, and activities to create experiences that resonate with audiences.
These agencies are staffed by professionals with expertise in project management, logistics, data collection and analysis, event staffing, and market research, plus creative aspects like concept creation and photo and video asset development.
They understand the specific strategies it takes to engage customers and drive measurable ROI.
How Agencies Drive Real Engagement
Brand activation agencies create impactful campaigns by focusing on customer engagement and measurable returns at every phase of planning.
Planning provides a roadmap for success. For a brand activation, that means building brand awareness, inspiring customer loyalty, and generating data you can use to shape future decisions.
Defining Goals That Matter
Increasing brand awareness, boosting sales, generating leads, launching a new product, building customer loyalty. These are common objectives.
Brand activation agencies help clients dig deep to define objectives. Not just what you want to accomplish, but how to measure effectiveness.
Ideally, an agency works with your brand from the very beginning. They help develop themes and creative concepts, build research-based strategies for connecting with your target audience, and manage the myriad relationships with vendors and locations that make your activation happen.
Uncovering What Your Audience Actually Wants
Determining your target audience is critical. It informs every choice that follows: location, timing, marketing, messaging, creative direction.
Brand activation agencies start by helping clients understand who their current customers are through wide-ranging research. They design and run polls or surveys to identify tastes, pain points, and product preferences. They analyze online reviews and conduct interviews with loyal customers to find out why they chose the brand.
They use online listening to pull insights from social media. They study website analytics to see which content customers find and use, how long they stay on the site, and other information that helps understand what customers are experiencing and thinking.
Personas are essentially fictional personalities representing different characteristics of your brand's ideal customer. Well-crafted personas help you provide a targeted experience by allowing you to tailor messaging, activities, and other aspects to their wants, needs, and tastes.
Agencies are also experts at using market research and publicly available information. They research the demographics and psychographics of your customers and narrow down locations offering the best access to those consumers.
Creating Experiences People Remember
Working from a well-developed sense of who your ideal customers are, the activation agency team brainstorms concepts that align with audience interests and reflect your brand's identity.
The agency's copywriters, designers, and experiential marketing specialists pay attention to products and brand identity, plus sensory and emotional aspects of the experience. They create fresh, exciting ways to highlight your brand's uniqueness.
Engaging, memorable activations are immersive. They offer participants an experience that's both multi-sensory and interactive. An activation is an opportunity to tell your brand's story as it relates to the target audience, and agencies use every tool at their disposal.
Core Services Activation Agencies Provide
Brand activation services include a combination of public-facing and behind-the-scenes work that combine to create powerful experiences. Here are the key services.
Experiential Marketing Vehicles & Event Footprint
Food trucks, RVs, glass box trucks, airstreams, horse trailers, carts. Branded vehicles are popular for activations, pop-up shops, and other experiential marketing events.
Brand activation agencies handle customizing the vehicles (usually custom-printed vinyl wrap) and can help staff and train a street team to attract participants and get them engaged.
Branded vehicles are mobile and relatively low cost. Your brand can go anywhere your target audience congregates: beaches, entertainment districts, college campuses. From choosing the right vehicle to wrapping it in custom-branded vinyl to delivering it to the location, agencies take your show on the road.
The footprint is the area surrounding the food truck, trailer, or other experiential vehicle. It creates a welcoming, intriguing, irresistible environment. It draws attention and pulls in passers-by.
Agencies help create a whole scene with frames, banners, props, and other creative elements designed to drive attention.
Custom Installations & Oversized Props
Want to stand out in an area crowded with other attractions? Whether at a festival, on a boardwalk, in a high-traffic retail hub, an oversized prop or custom-fabricated environment can be the key.
For strict visual appeal, it's tough to beat a massively oversized prop. At crowded environments like music festivals, beach boardwalks, or other high-traffic areas, oversized props help your activation stand out and draw passers-by looking for fun photo ops.
On a trade show floor crowded with dozens or hundreds of booths, a custom installation gives your activation an immersive kick that makes a memorable impact.
Working from your brand's visual elements, products, and other on-brand inspiration, experienced agencies strategize the best options, then manage design and fabrication to produce high-quality props.
Sponsorship Activations
Sponsoring a sporting event, running race, or festival is a great way to put your brand out there. But don't stop with getting your logo on a program or banner.
Holding a brand activation at the event itself can be a powerful springboard for brand awareness. Even more so if the activation is aligned with the event's theme, message, and purpose.
Sponsorship activations give your brand access to the event's audience. They offer consumers an opportunity to "meet" your brand in person, in an environment ripe for making memorable interactions.
Managing Logistics & Execution
With experiential marketing events, the creative aspects depend on logistical expertise to turn plans into reality.
Brand activation agencies have a reputation as detail-oriented project managers who navigate local permitting requirements and negotiate favorable deals with vendors. That's 100% accurate.
The logistics pros at agencies are experts at running the practical side in ways that bring creative vision to life. They work hand-in-hand with the creative team to ensure the vision goes off without a hitch by navigating the maze of local requirements and managing relationships with third-party vendors and suppliers.
Experienced agencies have been planning events long enough to have working relationships with municipalities and venues across the U.S. Brands can trust that the agency is negotiating fees and obtaining permits on their behalf.
For you and your team? No unpleasant surprises when setting up or running the event.
Finding and securing the perfect venue, navigating licensing and permitting requirements, transporting product, custom installations, and swag to the venue. Logistics touches every aspect of an experiential marketing event, and it's one of the most important roles an agency can fill.
Brand activations have a lot of moving parts that must be assembled piece by piece across weeks or months. Keeping everything running smoothly is a full-time job. Better planning makes for a better activation and greater success in achieving your goals.
Team Staffing & Training
Your own team will be a great asset, but particularly with mobile events, local help may be required. Brand ambassadors, chefs, drivers, street teams.
Brand activation agencies understand staffing requirements for experiential marketing and have the contacts and resources to source and hire qualified, enthusiastic personnel.
Because of their knowledge of your brand and its products, your staff will be valuable at any experiential event. But they might not be enough, and what if the event's not local?
Agencies know how to hire, vet, and train a team of enthusiastic, professional event staff to represent your brand well. They determine the number of people you need, filling roles from grabbing the attention of passers-by to assisting attendees to collecting email addresses.
Product Sampling Campaigns
Sampling campaigns are complex undertakings with an array of logistical, staffing, and permitting concerns that differ from other activations.
That's why many brands turn to activation agencies to strategize and run in-person sampling events. Agencies are experienced in sampling strategy and tactics, from how to present the product to how to package it and how to engage consumers.
The benefits of sampling are well documented. Studies show two-thirds to three-quarters of consumers who sample buy those very products. Sampling can also inspire brand loyalty as consumers experience a brand firsthand with no risk, sparking a connection that stays with them.
Trade Show Presence
Trade show booths get more fabulous by the minute, and the pressure to compete visually and experientially is intense.
Brand activation agencies stay on top of what's hot now and look ahead to emerging trends. They're an ideal partner for planning and executing a trade show presence that makes your brand stand out.
Trade shows draw thousands of attendees who are, by definition, a receptive audience eager for new experiences. They're an excellent place to showcase your brand one-on-one to consumers.
Trade shows also create an opportunity to collect qualitative and quantitative data about how your brand is perceived, what consumers like and don't like about your products, and more. Data you can feed back into your marketing strategy.
Culinary Services
Food-focused brand activations like mobile sampling tours obviously need the expertise and resources of culinary professionals. But so do events that aren't food-centered.
Free food is a strong draw for consumers in any environment. Activations hosted by food and beverage brands need culinary experts and staff to help plan, prepare, and serve guests. But so do non-food brands, particularly at events where food and beverages abound and offering refreshments is expected.
Brand activation companies understand this. They're expert at matching brands with culinary professionals who can help them connect with consumers. Typically, agencies have contacts in the local and regional food industry who can assist with menu creation, food-related logistics, and even onsite research like taste tests.
Everybody loves free food and beverages. Offering free refreshments to attendees is a great way to draw a crowd and make them stick around. It can also be a kindness (think offering bottles of cold water on a hot day) that triggers a sense of reciprocity.
Swag & Packaging
Promotional items like pens, T-shirts, and water bottles have been given away for generations for the simple reason that swag works.
A brand activation agency can work with clients to brainstorm swag ideas that fit the upcoming event and audience. The higher-quality and more useful the items, the more the swag will help the brand connect with customers.
The companies that produce branded swag offer a bewildering array of options, as seen in the variety of items handed out at sporting events, festivals, and other events. Choosing items that align with the event's theme and your brand's identity can be challenging.
An experienced agency will have a good sense of what items will connect with your target audience and the best vendors to produce them.
Not only does accepting a piece of swag incur a sense of obligation in the recipient, it's also a reminder of the brand and the experiential marketing event itself, cementing that positive experience in the consumer's mind.
Measuring Success & Building Future Campaigns
Data Collection & ROI Measurement
Brand activations offer brands a chance to interact with consumers and produce a lot of data. They're an unparalleled means of learning more about your customers and how to connect with them.
Brand activation agencies work with clients to create a plan for measuring results. That means building opportunities into the event to gather data, ensuring every event produces valuable, actionable insights.
Measuring return on investment for experiential marketing events can be challenging. Agencies know how to integrate data collection into planning, promoting, and launching brand experiences.
From establishing clear goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) to tracking attendee behavior at the event to assessing online engagement and sales afterward, agencies make sure your brand has solid data to work with in your post-event analysis.
The means by which agencies gather data include the obvious and relatively low-tech (keeping a headcount of participants) alongside progressively more complex tactics:
- Conducting surveys before, during, and after the event to gauge changes in awareness and perception
- Building an event-specific landing page to direct consumers to before, during, and after the event
- Creating unique QR codes and social media hashtags for the activation and related activities
- Tracking local and national media coverage
- Online "listening" to monitor increases in brand awareness
- Deploying sophisticated technology for tracking attendees as they move through the activation
- Using swag or product giveaways as an occasion for collecting attendees' email and contact information, or in exchange for completing short surveys or participating in interviews
Data collection helps determine ROI for experiential marketing events, but its value goes beyond deciding whether your activation was worth the budget. Data collection is also how you build a more broadly applicable understanding of consumer behavior and what resonates most with your target audience.
Brand activation companies collect data on consumers across the entire customer journey to ascertain what works for your brand and what falls short. The same behavior tracking tech that monitors attendee behavior in your activation space can be used to uncover insights about how customers move through your retail stores.
The online listening that helped plan and evaluate the activation can be applied to find and analyze customer reviews to understand brand perception and observe shifts in awareness over time. Monitoring online behavior can help you understand how customers use your website and what guides their purchasing decisions.
The data collected before, during, and after your brand activation will help you better understand your target audience, how your brand is perceived, how consumers interact with your product, what consumers like about your brand, and what resonates most strongly with them.
Feeding this data back into your marketing campaigns allows you to further personalize your events and marketing to capture your ideal customers.
Finally, all of these efforts only increase in value for brands that have worked with the same agency before. The agency has a means of comparison to better measure what worked against what didn't in each activation. Over time, this gives the brand and its agency opportunities to build on successes, optimizing activations with each new event.
Digital Asset Creation
Like any brand-sponsored event, an activation is an opportunity to capture fresh, exciting digital assets. Photos, footage of interactions with consumers, behind-the-scenes video, product photography.
A brand activation agency will help capture digital assets like still photos, behind-the-scenes video, event footage, and product photography for posting on social channels, creating long- and short-form video, showcasing on your website or blog, or showing your project internally.
This creates content for social media channels, your brand's website or blog, or long- or short-form video for promoting future events and other purposes.
Building Strategic Social Media Partnerships
Leveraging social media channels to promote your brand activation is always a smart move. But there's a way to level up that leverage: strategic partnership with influencers and brand ambassadors.
Connecting and partnering with these social media experts amplifies your brand's reach and credibility. It can even create cross-promotional opportunities with other brands.
Once you and your activation agency partners have identified objectives for the activation, their social media team can advise you in choosing which social media channels to focus energy on. From there, the agency can work with you to assess relevant content across those channels to find influencers in your industry.
Working from a list of five to ten creators, the agency will dig in more closely to find the best fits for your brand's identity, personality, and audience. While ultimately the choice to enter a collaborative relationship with an influencer belongs to the brand owner, the agency can help every step of the way.
From developing that initial pool of applicants to managing the relationship and coordinating the influencer's involvement in the activation, agencies handle the details.
Why Your Brand Needs an Activation Agency
Theoretically, you could plan, design, and execute a brand activation yourself. After all, who knows your brand and your customers better than you?
But knowing your brand inside and out and telling your brand's story in a way that truly connects with your target audience are two very different things.
Creating a successful brand activation requires not only a keen understanding of your brand but also experience telling brand stories in a way that takes consumers from casual observer to fully engaged customer.
Shifting the logistical and practical burdens of planning and execution to a knowledgeable, experienced brand activation agency means you and your team will have more time for the business of growing your brand and writing the next chapters of your brand's story.
Ready to create a brand activation that drives real results? Explore our complete guide to brand activations or get in touch to start planning your next campaign.
