What keeps Experiential Marketers up at night?

Experiential Marketing is a labor of love. There’s nothing like the feeling that you have pieced together an amazing experiential event that impacts event attendees and allows your client to collect data to realize a return on their investment. But experiential marketing isn’t easy. In fact, it’s really really hard and the people who show up for their clients every day are true heroes of experience. But even heroes have their foes. So, we’re asking, what keeps experiential marketers up at night and how can we help?

1. Dates/ Short Timelines

In our experience, the process of ideating, developing, and activating an experiential marketing tour can be stressful for agencies. Clients aren’t sure what they want, when they want to do it, or why they want to do it at all. This means that when activation dates are finalized, you’ve disqualified yourself from most vendors’ timelines. How are they supposed to build a two-story event structure from scratch with only a few weeks to design, permit, fabricate, and finish the whole thing? When you’re in a pinch like this, how are you supposed to handle it? Tell your client they’ll just have to miss their first date? Tell them it’s their fault for taking too long to make decisions?

2. Coordinating between vendors and clients to pull an event together

Once you’ve determined that your client’s budget and target dates fit with the solution you’ve provided (or they’ve suggested), its time to release and manage the vendors you’ve selected to complete the work. The designers are on one side of the country, the event activators are right down the street, the permitting office hasn’t called you back, and the client needs an update. Managing all those moving pieces can be a real nightmare and if something gets missed- that’s on you.

3. How to show your clients the next big idea.

So, you’ve had a few great activations with a client. Now it’s your job to sell them on the next tour. But how? Do your vendors help you discover the next great idea that will move the needle for your clients and make you look great in the process? If not, where do you find these ideas? How do you know if they’re worth their salt? Can you be sure that they’ll create enough impact to keep your client coming back for more?

There are tons of ways that experiential marketers can address these concerns, but we’d like to suggest that partnering with Boxman Studios can tackle many of these stressful situations before they become stressful at all.

How Boxman Studios Can Help

Dates and short timelines are a big deal if your vendor is slow or if their fabrication process is inefficient. Shipping container structures- even the big ones, can be built in weeks. That’s not our ideal- we don’t want you to wait until the last minute to contact us- but we’ve pulled together some amazing structures including adidas’s two NMD shoe launch structures and Facebook’s media hub at the 2016 RNC in less than a month.

Coordinating between vendors and clients is a PAIN. Particularly when you’re dealing with a vendor that’s providing some highly technical elements to the experiential event. Are you really supposed to spend your time researching permit requirements, filling out the paperwork, and checking with the vendor to guarantee compliance? Boxman Studios interacts with municipalities all over the country to do just that. We’re well versed in what it takes to get a pop-up shipping container approved. We’ll take that scope right off your plate- you don’t even need to think about it.

Finding the next big idea is sort of like a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow for experiential marketers. The rainbow never ends, you just keep hoping the thing you picked up is gold. Boxman Studios works with some of the most innovative brands in the world as clients, as vendors, and as partners. Our design and business development teams are in constant pursuit of outstanding technology, innovative ideas, and disruptive strategies. If you’re looking for an idea, just ask. We’ve got some of the best brains in the business powering our experiential marketing arsenal.

Addressing your stress isn’t just about knowing which materials and technologies work really well for experiential marketing and project management, it’s about working with great partners that help pull you across the finish line. If you’re feeling like you could use a break and a deep breath, reach out to our business development team. Relax; we’ve got this.