Experiential marketing seeks to immerse consumers within a product and encompasses an entire funnel of marketing efforts. With the goal of engaging consumers to allow them to experience a brand, experiential marketing is critical to driving personalized engagement, shareability, and an emotional connection between the consumer and the product. Since experiential marketing is more complex than other types of advertising, you need a reliable and experienced experiential marketing agency to count on.
We’ve evaluated the top agencies which provide experiential marketing services. Numerous companies specialize in experiential marketing and each provides its own unique approach to developing an engaging experiential marketing funnel for its clients.
For your convenience, we’ve compiled a list of the 10 best experiential marketing agencies, measuring factors like pricing, support services, experience, and strategy. Once you review these 10 companies, we are certain you will find one which can best fit the needs of you or your business.
Top 10 Best Experiential Marketing Agencies
- Groove Jones – Best Overall
- Evolve Activation – Best for Budget
- Amplify – Best for Criteria
- iMP Experiential – Best for Creative Engagement
- Backlash – Best for Return on Investment
- All Terrain – Best for Full Service
- NEXT / NOW – Best for VR and AR
- The Engine is Red – Best for Personalized Service
- TalkingTree Creative – Best for Events
- Sector 5 Digital – Best for Strategic Insight
1. Groove Jones – Best Overall Experiential Marketing Agency
| Pricing: | $25,000 minimum budget |
| Location: | 3900 Willow Street Dallas, TX 75226 United States |
| Founded: | 2015 |
| Key Clients: | NASCAR, General Mills, Lexus, Mastercard, McDonalds, Cheerios, AT&T |
An award winning experiential marketing agency, Groove Jones produces elite experiences for some of the world’s largest brands. By integrating augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) with proprietary machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI), Groove Jones creates a deep wealth of experiential marketing engagements. Supporting brands like Intel, Lexus, and Amazon, Groove Jones has a reputation for partnering with highly recognizable brands.
The team at Groove Jones comes from a variety of backgrounds, each bringing unique disciplines to their experiential marketing efforts. Groove Jones relies on an array of tools to service its clients, including AR lens and photo filters, mobile app development, CGI and animation, and other ML and AI based applications. Each of these tools operates off of the agency’s proprietary GrooveTech software, which allows clients to seamlessly monitor the entire experiential marketing funnel from one consolidated platform.
Given their previous awards, brand-name clients, and innovative proprietary technology, Groove Jones is the best overall experiential marketing agency.
2. Evolve Activation – Best Experiential Marketing Agency for Budget
| Pricing: | $1,000 minimum budget |
| Location: | 9304 San Fernando Road Los Angeles, CA 91352 United States |
| Founded: | 2013 |
| Key Clients: | Google, Zumba, Cisco, Amazon, LG, SHOWTIME, YouTheory, Hawaiian Tropic |
Founded in 2013, Evolve Activations provides a wide repertoire of experiential marketing tools to its clients. Led my experiential marketing experts with a zeal for solving new challenges, Evolve Activation can seamlessly integrate into a client’s existing marketing efforts to develop and evolve a marketing campaign.
With a low minimum budget required, Evolve Activation is the top choice for businesses operating on a tight budget. Select services can be chosen by clients to implementation, such as program development, field staffing, or other activities. Alternatively, these services can be rolled into a comprehensive experiential marketing strategy by the agency, which have proven highly successful at producing quick results.
Having completed past projects for both large and small companies, Evolve Activation makes sure its clients receive the maximum value for what they pay – no matter what size their budget is.
3. Amplify – Best Experiential Marketing Agency for Funnel Criteria
| Pricing: | Custom Pricing |
| Location: | 27 Paul Street London, EC2A 4JU, United Kingdom |
| Founded: | 2007 |
| Key Clients: | Airbnb, Spotify, Nike, PlayStation |
An agency based in London offering experiential marketing services, Amplify excels at meeting the goals and specific performance criteria of its clients. Known for their flexibility and robustness, the experiential marketing funnels Amplify creates can be fine-tuned to meet a client’s particular requests.
Since consumers often seek to engage with brands that they share beliefs, values, or interests with, having this flexibility can be valuable to businesses developing their brands for the first time. According to Amplify, each brand has its own personality and will form its own connections with consumers. If businesses have specific consumers they want to engage with, they should consider partnering with Amplify to set specific, attainable, and effective experiential marketing funnel criteria.
4. iMP Experiential – Best Experiential Marketing Agency for Creative Engagement
| Pricing: | $1,000 minimum budget |
| Location: | 31 Burley Road Leeds, WYK LS3 1JT United Kingdom |
| Founded: | 2008 |
| Key Clients: | Maserati, Microsoft, Rolls-Royce, Cadbury, Fiat, Kellogg’s |
Creativity, the ability to innovate, and visually appealing design are key skills to creating an effective experiential marketing funnel. Companies will need to get creative to engage digital consumers and allow them to have an immersive brand experience. Agencies like iMP Experiential specialize in forming these creative funnels.
Through product sampling roadshows, brand activations, and other VR experiences, iMP Experiential partners with clients to design and deliver engaging experiential campaigns. The agency has a history of developing extremely unique and memorable brand experiences, such as distributing 50,000 protein shakes at various London tube stations.
iMP Experiential excels at bringing products to life in-person, but has also grown to effectively marketing across digital and social platforms as well through VR and AR technologies.
5. Backlash – Best Experiential Marketing Agency for Return on Investment
| Pricing: | Custom Pricing |
| Location: | Pill Box PB307, 115 Coventry Road London, E2 6GG United Kingdom |
| Founded: | 2017 |
| Key Clients: | Next, Olivia Burton, three Mobile, Avery Dennison, Debenhams, Fenty |
While other marketing agencies may measure success based on traffic, sales, or engagements, Backlash focuses on maximizing its clients’ return on investment (ROI) in all marketing decisions. A full service creative experiential agency, Backlash follows a carefully-designed procedure of constructing an effective experiential marketing funnel which will maximize profits.
Backlash will walk the client through each step of the experiential marketing patch, from strategic consultation to concepting via 2D and 3D design to live events and final campaign evaluation. The client is guided step-by-step throughout the procedure and has input through the entire process to help Backlash determine where ROI can be maximized. Such healthy collaboration guarantees Backlash has every opportunity to help their clients increase profits and fine-tune their approach.
6. All Terrain – Best Experiential Marketing Agency for Full Service
| Pricing: | $100,000 minimum budget |
| Location: | 1313 North Capmbell Ave Chicago, IL 60622 United States |
| Founded: | 1998 |
| Key Clients: | Ferrari, Mango Board, H&M, Hostess, Quaker, American Airlines |
Self-described as a women-owned and independently held marketing powerhouse, All Terrain has distinguished itself as a reliable, successful, and innovative experiential marketing agency. Each experience created by All Terrain is centered around people and is supported by digital integration and social amplification technologies.
All Terrain offers a full service to each of its clients, which includes strategy insights, analytics, creative design, and in-depth marketing account management. By partnering with clients across several industries, All Terrain can customize its services to fit any client’s needs – whether it wants its experiences to be culturally significant, tuned for new audiences, or entirely virtual. Although a higher minimum budget is required than other agencies, clients will receive an immense amount of content, strategy, guidance, and support for experiential marketing.
As clients attest, the growth experienced from partnering with All Terrain increases consistently over time, and an initial partnership can provide a strong foundation for such growth to spring from.
7. NEXT / NOW – Best Experiential Marketing Agency for VR and AR
| Pricing: | $50,000 minimum budget |
| Location: | 1200 W Lake St. Ste 200 Chicago, IL 60607 United States |
| Founded: | 2011 |
| Key Clients: | Intel, Audi, BP, Mazda, National Basketball Association (NBA), Under Armour |
In the digital era, agencies must compete to effectively engage to consumers through newer technologies. As opposed to in-person experiences, more and more businesses are seeking virtual or augmented experiences to use to introduce consumers to their brands. NEXT / NOW specializes in providing these services to world-class brands.
NEXT / NOW employs VR and AR technologies, along with projection mapping, facial tracking, and other motion interactivity to create immersive moments for customers to digitally experience a good or brand. With clients like Intel, Under Armour, and Mazda, NEXT / NOW has succeeded in developing these technologies and efficiently using them to create unique experiential marketing funnels. The use of VR and AR also allows NEXT / NOW to reach audiences over a much larger scale, as there are no geographic limitations as experienced with live in-person events.
8. The Engine is Red – Best Experiential Marketing Agency Offering Personalized Service
| Pricing: | $5,000 minimum budget |
| Location: | 401 Mendocino Avenue Santa Rosa, CA 95401 United States |
| Founded: | 2008 |
| Key Clients: | United Way, PG&E, Swinerton Builders, Medtronic, Fetzer Vineyards |
The ability of a client to provide input, request customization, and assist in fine-tuning an experiential marketing funnel is incredibly important to making sure the target audience is reached optimally. With The Engine is Red, this type of collaboration is requested from each client. Unlike other agencies, Engine seeks to make the voices and opinions of each and every one of its clients heard and listened to.
Engine provides a full service to its customers along with a simple process to request changes or alterations to an experiential marketing funnel. Through strategy building, creative community engagement, and innovative design, Engine makes sure the marketing campaign for each client is unique, optimized, and flexible. This flexibility allows Engine to alter the experiential marketing campaign as soon as needed if requested from the client.
9. TalkingTree Creative – Best Experiential Marketing Agency for Events
| Pricing: | $5,000 minimum budget |
| Location: | 1430 Joh Avenue, St. H Baltimore, MD 21227 United States |
| Founded: | 1993 |
| Key Clients: | Hughes, BAE Systems, KPMG, Various Government Agencies |
While virtual engagement with consumers is increasingly important, for an immersive, memorable, and truly detailed experience, in-person events are some of the most effective tools for experiential marketing. Led by a team of entertainment and marketing professionals, TalkingTree Creative has built a reputation for orchestrating highly-effective experiential events across the country.
Based on a client’s business type, mission, goals, and budget, TalkingTree Creative will formulate a series of events best suited to meet the client’s needs. These events have proven incredibly successful for world-class brands in the past, and often attract a wide variety of audiences into engaging with new brands on an immersive level.
Along with live events, TalkingTree Creative will also develop a greater experiential marketing strategy for the client. These strategies often include other methods of experiential marketing, such as through VR, media production, and incorporation methods for later marketing campaigns.
10. Sector 5 Digital – Best Experiential Marketing Agency for Strategic Insight
| Pricing: | $25,000 minimum budget |
| Location: | 4300 Amon Carter Blvd, Suite 104 Fort Worth, TX 76155 United States |
| Founded: | 2014 |
| Key Clients: | Textron Aviation, International Business Machines (IBM) Corp, Bell, Ecolab |
Having an engaging experiential marketing funnel is important; but making sure this funnel operates as designed is critical. Sometimes, a company’s experiential marketing efforts may miss the mark, and fail to interact with the target audience. Reasons can include a lack of interesting content, a technical failure, or simply a failure to reach the right audiences who share the same beliefs or interests of a brand.
Sector 5 Digital ensures that any experiential marketing efforts undertaken for a client are matched with detailed strategic insight for that client. Having data and critical analytics allow both Sector 5 and the client to re-strategize, fine-tune, or modify their experiential marketing approach. Since ‘time is money’ and businesses do not want to lose out on any potential consumers, this type of strategic insight support is a valuable tool.
Along with strategic insight, Sector 5 Digital also offers innovative digital content for communications and sales. This content is supported by virtual events, and combined with strategic insight, can help a client grow their marketing efforts quickly.
External References:
- https://www.groovejones.com/
- https://evolveactivation.com/
- https://www.weareamplify.com/
- https://www.iamimp.com/
- https://backlash.co.uk/
- https://allterrain.net/
- https://nextnowagency.com/
- https://theengineisred.com/
- https://www.talkingtreecreative.com/
- https://www.sector5digital.com/