Along with experiential marketing consultants and brand activation coordinators, experiential marketing coordinators have emerged as a must-have role for many agencies and brands. But what do they actually bring to the table, and does your brand need them? Here’s a look at the role and the required skills.
What Experiential Marketing Coordinators Do
Working within agencies, as independent consultants, or as freelancers, experiential marketing coordinators work with clients to create and deliver experiences that showcase their brands, cutting through the cacophony of marketing and advertising messaging to connect with consumers. They provide many of the experiential marketing services offered by specialized agencies, so their involvement in experiential marketing events runs from the earliest beginnings of a project through the aftermath of ROI calculation and assessment.
For the brands and agencies they work with, an experiential marketing coordinator often provides a fresh perspective, one that’s not clouded by inter-team hierarchy or “how it’s always been done.” The coordinator can both offer an unbiased perspective on the brand and help balance competing visions for how best to reach and connect with its audience.
That’s crucial to success in the experiential marketing sphere, because “successful execution of such campaigns requires a deep understanding of the brand's essence, audience preferences, and the current market landscape,” says experiential consultancy Ronin.
Strategy
Experiential marketing coordinators work with clients, creatives, and stakeholders to create the strategy for experiential events as well as other marketing and advertising. The goal is to develop unique campaigns that accomplish business goals while building brand-consumer connections. Because they’re so involved in every stage of a project, experiential marketing coordinators are often involved in strategy from the very start.
Planning & Logistics
The experiential marketing coordinator’s role includes planning brand experiences like activations, pop-ups, trade shows, and other events that engage consumers directly in a way that forges positive brand-consumer connections. Post-planning, responsibilities include logistics management, budgeting, vendor management, and performance analysis to measure success events and derive insights to improve future events.
Collaboration
Creating unique brand experiences that connect with consumers requires a wide range of creative skills — graphic design and copywriting among them — so while every experiential marketing coordinator doesn’t have all of the required skills, they typically have experience working with those who do. Collaborating with and coordinating the efforts of multiple creative pros is part of the job.
Research
Fostering meaningful interactions between brands and consumers starts with understanding the target audience, and that takes research. Experiential marketing coordinators are expert researchers, performing market research, conducting surveys, facilitating focus groups, and interacting with customers to help the brands they represent target and hone their messaging.
What Qualifications Do Experiential Marketing Coordinators Have?
People who fill experiential marketing coordinator roles come from a variety of educational and career backgrounds: advertising, marketing, event planning, and more. Many have held other experiential marketing positions, and the coordinator position itself may go by many names, such as project manager, project coordinator, and experiential marketing consultant. And the role itself varies from agency to agency, client to client, even project to project.
What all experiential marketing coordinators have in common is a blend of creative, organizational, and analytical skills, along with the ability to manage multiple concurrent projects, that help them tie together the disparate parts of a project into a seamless, powerfully effective whole.
Digital marketing expertise is an essential qualification for marketing coordinators in every corner of the industry. An experiential marketing coordinator is a digital marketing pro, and any good coordinator has a solid foundation in digital marketing skills across multiple platforms. Along with expertise in content marketing that drives engagement and ultimately conversions, they have a knack for brand messaging and excellent copywriting skills. They’re experienced in email marketing, using best practices to build and drive campaigns. And they have the requisite web development skills to make at least basic website edits and format email newsletters.
This extends to social media, too. Firsthand understanding of and experience in all aspects of digital marketing, from social media posting to influencer relationship management to online promotion, is a tremendous asset in experiential marketing coordination. Experiential marketing coordinators are often tasked with finding, vetting, and developing relationships with influencers, and managing influencer and brand ambassador relationships with the brand.
An experiential marketing coordinator must understand how to plan, promote, and execute live events such as pop-ups and activations. They will typically have a professional background managing logistics and operations, contracts, and vendor relationships.
Beyond that experience, a defining characteristic of great experiential marketing coordinators is their ability to think on their feet — to problem solve under deadline and under pressure. Experiential marketing is sometimes a wild ride, with problems ranging from bad weather to loss of wifi to vendor cancellations potentially derailing even the best plans. Experiential marketing coordinators understand the necessity of contingency planning, and the quick thinking and flexibility needed to manage the challenges and risks inherent in live events. The goal is to produce experiential marketing events, activations, and pop-ups that connect brands with their ideal audiences by providing a seamless, positive experience that will stick with consumers long after the event’s end.
Promobile Marketing is a dynamic experiential marketing firm based in New York City. For over a decade, Promobile has collaborated with a range of brands—from budding startups to major CPG brands—on immersive marketing campaigns. Want to discuss your next project? Reach out below.
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