How to create a hybrid brand activation campaign

What is a hybrid brand activation campaign?

A hybrid brand activation campaign uses a mix of traditional and digital marketing to create awareness for your brand. Rather than focusing solely on in-person events or online platforms, it combines both to achieve more effective engagement and reach. It’s about creating experiences that help your brand stand out in people’s minds, making them more likely to become loyal customers.

While brand marketing is an ongoing process, hybrid brand activation is usually a one-off effort and is focused on making your business known. To cut-through the noise, this type of campaign often consists of interactive experiences such as events, giveaways, immersive digital tools, pop-up stores, and competitions.

How do you plan a hybrid brand activation?

Identify your goals

To plan an effective hybrid brand activation campaign, you need to know what your goals are. Generally speaking, brands will focus on awareness, app sign-ups, or social media follows for this type of campaign.

Decide where you will focus your efforts

Once you know what your goals are, this can guide where and how you’re going to market your brand. Will you launch experiences in-store, at a trade show, at an event (such as a festival or sporting match), or online? Think about what would be best aligned to your brand and where your target audiences spend their time.

Brainstorm ideas

Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. Brainstorm some ideas with your team and create a list. We’ve provided a few immersive digital marketing examples below to get you started.

These can be combined with physical and online tactics across a number of channels and touchpoints.

Identify your metrics

How will you measure the success of your campaign? While brand awareness can be difficult to measure, there are a few metrics you can use depending on your goals. These include:

• App sign-ups
• Website traffic
• Social media interactions
• Event attendance
• Engagement with your experiential marketing

If you’re running hybrid brand activation activities through XRii, you can track metrics such as the following to help measure the success of your campaign:

• Interactions with and time spent in your AR experience
• Experiences started vs. completed
• Did users play your game and how many points did they get?
• Unique vs. returning users
• Engagement rate
• Retention rate
• Average daily active users

3 hybrid brand activation campaign ideas using XRii

With so many brands in the market, it’s extremely difficult to stand out. That’s why many businesses are turning to memorable digital interactions that make their brand more recognisable. The XRii Digital Loyalty platform makes it easy for your brand to use technology like augmented reality (AR) and geo-mapping to include experiential marketing as part of your hybrid brand activation campaign. Below are a few ways you can use it.

1. Scavenger hunt

Make interacting with your brand fun and create connections between people with a scavenger hunt. XRii Digital Loyalty solutions use augmented reality, gamification and geo-mapping to provide out-of-the-box interactive experiences to brands. You can choose from a range of challenges and missions from the platform dashboard and then customise it with your own design.

Scavenger hunts are a great tactic for brand activation because they can be used to create experiences for your customers anywhere in the world. It helps businesses to increase awareness by boosting visibility of products, services or store locations while also elevating interest in the brand.

2. Promote a location

If you’re launching your brand in certain locations, you can drive traffic to these areas by using location-based targeting and experiences in XRii. With geo-mapping and AR, you can drop coupons and discounts anywhere in the world for people to use in-store.

Once your business has signed up for XRii, you can choose your locations, upload your branding and customise your rewards. This ranges from digital coupons, discounts and cash back promotions.

You can use a mix of traditional and digital advertising to encourage people to interact with your experience. This can range from putting QR codes on giveaway items or bus stops to targeted ads on Google or social media that link to your interactive promotion.

3. At-home engagement

Don’t forget about your potential audiences at home. Even though they're not at a physical store, venue, or event, they can still enjoy hands-on interactions with your brand and it’s incredibly valuable to include them in your brand activation campaign.

Build strong connections with people, even at home, by setting up blended experiences using a mix of real world and digital elements such as AR. In a similar way to driving traffic to your brick-and-mortar stores, you can also link rewards to your online store to drive traffic to your website.

By leveraging the power of immersive digital experiences, you can create a memorable hybrid brand activation campaign. Surprise and delight your audiences with opportunities to interact with your brand, get rewards and learn about your products and services in fun and unexpected ways.

Get started with XRii

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