Harnessing the Power of Experiential Marketing

Why in-person experiences matter to your district’s brand and how to create effective ones

If you’ve ever been to a concert, you know that live music hits different. Maybe it’s the bass thrumming through the arena or the crackle in your throat after screaming for an encore. Maybe it’s the proximity to your favorite singer or the thrill of singing in unison with thousands of other fans. Maybe it’s just the novelty of something you don’t get to do every day. Whatever the reason, a live show feels worlds away from listening to an album in your car. It’s more than a way to pass the time; it’s an experience. And when it’s over—if the show was good—you come away even more in love with your favorite band than you were before.

Many of your district’s stakeholders—parents and guardians, prospective teachers, outside community members, and more—don’t spend time in your schools every day. If your district was a band, they’d be listening to you in their cars (that is, if they’re even fans at all). But like a live concert, in-person school experiences have a greater impact—and they have the potential to make your community fall even more in love with your schools.

Private sector companies often engineer special opportunities to build their brands through face-to-face connection with their audiences—a tactic called experiential marketing. Generally, experiential marketing entails more than typical day-to-day connections like entering a store and engaging with staff. Like concerts, the experiences brands create fall outside the ordinary. As we’ll see, they’re especially memorable, interactive, rich with emotional connection, and worth telling your friends about afterward. 

The private sector has embraced this strategy for years—and while the pandemic did hit experiential marketers hard, experiences have since come back more powerful than ever. In a 2022 survey by industry magazine Event Marketer, 54% of brands said they were even more confident about the value of live events than they had been before the pandemic. It makes sense; having been deprived of in-person experiences for a prolonged stretch of time, we appreciate them even more now. This year, research from event management software AnyRoad found that 90% of private sector marketers consider brand experiences “important” or “absolutely critical” to their organizations’ success.

We know that in many ways, schools and private sector companies are not the same. You probably don’t have the funding or the staff to pull off the kind of elaborate brand stunts you might see at SXSW. But you don’t need them—because you’re engaging your school community with branded experiences all the time.

Think about it: Back-to-school nights. Football games. Parent-teacher conferences. Award ceremonies. Science fairs. Even staff convocations and teacher recruitment fairs. Whether you’ve thought about them this way or not, school events are experiences—and if you engineer them intentionally, they can help you accomplish a few crucial goals.

What can experiential marketing do for you?
Experiential marketing has proven to be effective in helping brands accomplish three major goals: building brand awareness, fostering brand loyalty and generating word of mouth. 

Brand awareness
Whether you want families to enroll their children in your district, teachers to submit job applications or senior citizens to vote “Yes” on your school bond, you need to make a positive first impression. Luckily, branded experiences—from recruitment fairs to open houses—are a great way to introduce your community to your schools and show them what your district stands for.

According to a 2023 report from global events company Freeman and independent research firm Edelman DXI, people who interacted with a brand at a live event generally left with an extremely positive impression of that brand. More than three-quarters left the event trusting that the brand would do what was right, be honest, and be good at what they did. What’s more, nearly 70% interacted with the brand online, visited the brand’s website or even made a purchase after the event.

Brand loyalty
You know as well as we do that retention—whether of students or of staff—is crucial to the success of your schools. But if the district across town starts offering an exciting new academic program or significantly boosts their pay scales, what’s keeping your students and teachers from jumping ship? The answer is brand loyalty: a true emotional connection to your schools.

Building brand loyalty is one of the strongest reasons to invest in experiences. In the AnyRoad survey we referenced earlier, 43% of private sector marketers listed “growing or deepening loyalty” as their primary goal for experiential marketing. And research has shown that when executed well, branded experiences can boost consumers’ trust in a brand and their perception of its quality, leading to greater brand loyalty.  

Word of mouth
According to a 2021 study from Nielsen, 88% of individuals trust the recommendations of people they know above all other forms of marketing. In other words, what you say about yourself matters much less than what others say about you. That means positive word of mouth is critical to maintaining a strong district brand. And branded experiences are a great way to get people talking. 

Data from Freeman and Edelman DXI indicates that after attending a live event, 67% of consumers want to talk about the brand or company to others. As we’ll see, social media plays a role here, too. According to a 2020 study in the Journal of Business Research, branded experiences often prompt participants to create organic social media content promoting the brand.

What makes an effective experience?
It’s crucial to note that simply holding a live event is not enough to guarantee these results. Like any other part of marketing, this isn’t a box to check off, but a strategy to think about carefully and execute precisely. But what elements go into an effective school experience—and how can you engineer them?

Interactivity
The most engaging experiences invite audiences to participate in some way. This may seem like a no-brainer; after all, aren’t most in-person experiences interactive? Well, not necessarily.

Let’s switch gears for a second and think about pedagogy. As we’re sure you already know, there’s a lot of research to suggest that active learning—where students are engaged in interactive activities or discussions—is more effective than passive learning. The same is true outside of a classroom setting. Participating in an experience—rather than merely observing it—makes audiences more likely to feel strongly about it and remember it well. Studies have also indicated that the more senses an experience engages, the more likely you are to remember that experience. Simply giving stakeholders a chance to touch, taste or even smell something boosts the memorability of an event.

To create an engaging, interactive experience, you don’t need anything flashy—you just need to put a little thought into how to invite your audience to participate. For example, why not have parents at back-to-school night fingerpaint to demonstrate what their kindergarteners will be doing in the coming year? Or host a trivia game to give  families of older students a glimpse of the next year’s curriculum? 

And no matter what kind of experience you’re building, be sure to leave room for your audience to have one-on-one interactions with staff members or other advocates for your district. As we’ll see, building emotional connections that show stakeholders you care is paramount to a successful experience.

Emotional connection
Perhaps the most important aspect of an effective experience is emotion. If you want to pique your community’s interest, build loyalty or get people talking, you’ll need to evoke a positive emotional response. But why? Because emotions have a huge impact on decision-making—whether we’re choosing where to send our kids to school or how to vote on a bond initiative.

Zhecho Dobrev, author of The Big Miss: How Organizations Overlook the Power of Emotions, has done a lot of research on this point. “If you ask people, they will say emotions are not important to their decision-making,” he tells SchoolCEO. “They want to be rational. But the data shows that emotions are very important.” In a survey of nearly 19,000 customers across the U.S. and U.K., Dobrev determined that “emotional attachment” was the greatest driver of business value, even ranking above product quality. This means that people were more likely to stay with a brand, recommend it to their friends and prefer it over competitors if they felt an emotional connection to it.

Which begs the question: How do you foster an emotional connection with your district? According to Dobrev, it’s much the same as building a close interpersonal relationship. When people feel that a brand cares about them, respects them, listens to them, is responsive to their needs—that all creates emotional attachment. “You can’t have an emotional connection with someone if you think they don’t care about you,” he says. “That’s valid for personal relationships, it’s valid in business relationships, and our research suggests that it’s valid for school experiences as well.”

As you start planning an in-person experience for your district, think about how you can show your audience—whether it’s families, teachers or students—that you care about them. For a great example, look at the Waterford Welcome enrollment events put on by Michigan’s Waterford School District. With balloons and bubbles and branded swag, these events get families excited about their new schools—but more than that, they immediately prove that Waterford cares. As parents and guardians fill out enrollment forms, staff members stand by to answer questions or even walk them through the paperwork step-by-step. Interpreters are available to help Spanish-speaking families navigate the process. There’s even a play area to keep kids entertained. None of those touches are particularly flashy, but they help to build that all-important emotional connection.

Memorability
For an experience to effectively build awareness, loyalty and word of mouth, it also needs to be memorable. As it turns out, memories have a great deal of influence over the decisions we make. According to the work of author and psychologist Daniel Kahneman, we don’t actually make decisions based on our past experiences; we make decisions based on our memories of those experiences. When your stakeholders sit down to make choices involving your school district—whether to send their kids there or donate money to a fundraiser—it’s their memories that will sway them one way or the other. A strong positive memory of an in-person experience could be the deciding factor.

So what makes an experience memorable? Well, one factor is emotion—another reason to pay attention to the feelings you’re evoking. If you’re a sports fan, Dobrev says, “you don’t remember every single game, but there are some games that really stick in your mind—because those are moments of high intensity.” It’s the same for your community’s experiences with your district. “If you think about your own experience in school, you don’t remember every single moment,” he says. “But if you think about what sticks in your mind, you see that those are moments with high emotional intensity, both positive and negative.”

We are also more likely to remember experiences that were novel or that surprised us in some way. Research has shown that when older adults are asked about their most vivid memories, the ones they mention tend to come disproportionately from the period between ages 15 and 30. Relatedly, this time in our lives is full of “first” experiences—first car, first job, first serious relationship, first child. These moments stick in our minds not only because they’re emotional, but because they’re so new to us. 

Some experiences—like the first day of school—are novel by nature, but more commonplace experiences need a little boost of surprise to make them memorable. Engineering a memorable surprise starts with knowing your audience’s expectations. When the reality of a situation is worse than we expect, we experience negative surprise: disappointment. But when reality surpasses our expectations, we experience delight. As a combined force, surprise and delight can utterly revolutionize the way people feel about your district. It’s your job as a school leader to figure out what your community expects of a given experience and not just meet those expectations, but surpass them. 

When I was in high school, we attended schoolwide pep rallies before important basketball or football games. Most of them were about the same: Cheerleaders performed, players led chants, the principal spoke. But almost 15 years later, the only pep rally I remember vividly is the one where nearly the entire staff surprised us with a flash mob of “Thriller.” 

The student body was absolutely shocked and awed. We lost our minds. And while the element of surprise certainly played a role, I don’t think that’s the only reason it has stuck with me for so long. Those teachers and support staff spent weeks learning this dance on their own time, just to see the looks on our faces. If that’s not proof that they cared about us, I don’t know what is. 

Shareability 
Finally, the best experiences make people want to share them with others. It’s not hard to see why this should be an important part of your strategy; after all, word of mouth is one of the primary reasons to invest in experiences in the first place. So what makes an experience worth sharing? Well, all of the elements we’ve talked about so far—interactivity, emotional connection and memorability—boost the likelihood that your audience will share their experience with their friends. 

Surprise helps here too. In their book on the subject, “Surprisologists” Tania Luna and Dr. LeeAnn Renninger explain that when we’re surprised, our brains need help working through what’s happened—so we share the experience with others. (We’ve all called a friend to say, “You won’t believe what happened to me today.”) So it’s easy to see how surprise fits into marketing. When you offer people a pleasant surprise, they’ll post about it on Instagram or tell a friend over coffee. Whether they know it or not, they’ll become part of your district’s marketing. 

But there’s also a more straightforward way to make your event shareable: prompting your audience to post about the experience on social media. Invite your attendees to share their experience using event-specific hashtags. Include a photo booth so your community can take pictures to post on Instagram. Authentic social media buzz like this—called “user-generated content” in the private sector—is worth its weight in gold. According to a 2023 survey from marketing platform TINT, people trust user-generated content more than any other type of content. (For more on how digital strategies can boost the effectiveness of your experiences, check out "Pics or It Didn't Happen.")

Without the same levels of funding and staff power as private sector brands, it may feel like you’re at a disadvantage when it comes to building effective experiences. But really, schools have a leg up on the private sector—just because you have so many opportunities. Some brands struggle to meet their customers face-to-face, but you see at least some of your stakeholders every single day. Whenever you gather part of your community together, it’s a chance to give them a great experience; you just have to be intentional.