Sensory Marketing Strategies: Activate the 5 Senses

Sensory marketing strategies are influenced by the great philosopher Aristotle. He explained more than 2,000 years ago that human beings can only create understanding through the senses.

For Aristotle the formula was simple: From what we can perceive a memory arises, through these repeated memories the experience is revived. And what are the activators of these psychological processes? The five senses: hearing, sight, smell, taste, and touch.

Psychology transformed this simple formula into an operant:

Sensation> perception> attention> memory.

It didn’t take long for companies to understand these concepts and apply them to improve the consumer experience. So sensory marketing is born from all those actions that lead the user to experience a sensation that in turn is able to connect with a positive memory.

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How does sensory marketing work?

In order to capture the user, any of the 5 senses are used:

Sight: It allows us to observe everything that surrounds us. In this sense, sensory marketing is responsible for playing with brand colors, typography, visual impact between photographs, among others.
The ear: Everything that refers to sounds. Companies tend to play with melodies that are trapped in your memory in the fusion of their slogan.
Smell: The ability to detect odors. This sense has more than two marketing strategies, sensory and olfactory marketing. Where companies are able to create their own scents so that customers stay longer within their facilities.
Touch: Contact with the external world, a person, an object among others. Have you ever gone through a perfume store and the seller has suggested you apply a little of the fragrance on your hand? This is where a sensory experience related to touch is used.
Taste: Feel pleasure in the fusion of textures and flavors. This is achieved by food companies that dare to innovate.

But how can we use these sensory marketing strategies in the digital area? Here we explain how you can use the power of the 5 senses to sell online:

Sensory marketing strategies that you can use in the digital area

Visual marketing

Mobile devices and computers rely heavily on this: sight. There are a number of ways you can experiment with this sense:

With the graphic identity

First of all, you must define your graphic identity: branding strategy, typography, colors associated with the brand, slogan among others. Only in this way can you really make your users experience rewarding sensations. And you can only get to these when you connect with your purpose as a brand.

Web design

Once you have determined your brand insight, you must choose a professional web design that adapts to this same scale of values. Besides this, you need it to look professional and to be fast and intuitive.

This way you keep the user on your website for longer and there is a high probability that they will end up acquiring a product or service from your page.

A web page with a section for a blog

For a web page to generate more sales, it must play dynamically with these visual elements.

High-quality images.
Dynamic infographics.
Informative and persuasive content.
Buttons and calls to action.
Videos.
Banners.

Olfactory marketing

Does it seem inconsistent to be able to carry out olfactory marketing through digital media? The answer is no if you find the ways. What is crucial is to determine if the smell is a characteristic element for your sales.

For example, an olfactory marketing strategy does not have the same influence in a perfume store vs a cell phone store.

But if you are influential in the perfume store, you can use email marketing to invite some users to receive free samples through home delivery.

Note: Of course, remember to have evaluated your potential user well, the idea of this strategy is to increase the profit margin.

Sound Marketing

Have you created a slogan that has stayed in the minds of your consumers? Do the analyzes carried out indicate the effectiveness of identifying the slogan with your brand?

Include it strategically on your website! When we refer to strategy, the idea is not to saturate the user, but to remind him of the sound so that he can associate it with an emotion already experienced.

You can use it in the following way:

Video marketing
Applications that have your slogan as opening.
Podcast
Audiobooks.

If you look around, how many people are not with headphones on the street, on the way to work, or on the bus? Just as visual marketing has a huge impact, the sound would be in the top number 2 of learning jobs.

So if your business is associated with music, debates, sports, among others. Using sound marketing will considerably increase your online sales.

Gustatory Marketing

In a pandemic period, online sales of consumable products in Spain increased by 60% compared to the date of February 24, 2019. According to the daily security notebooks .

The food sector has become a potential sales sector. How can you take advantage of taste marketing in your business model?

Offer discounts and promotions on meal combos. In addition to this add a gift ticket.
Through WhatsApp business, broadcast massively to your customers: sending your advertising images in personalized conversations, uploading them to your stories, among others.
Use e-mail marketing in a personalized way to send promotions to your food company.

This is the case that your company is related to the food sector. But it doesn’t have to be 100% food-related. You can also use, for example, the use of candy or chocolate when making your shipments. In this way, they will also feel pleased and will feel motivated to continue purchasing your product.

Touch Marketing

Touch conceals an ingenuity within itself, it has a great influence in the clothing sector. How can you use this strategy virtually? When your customer loyalizes a purchase and you have to make a shipment.

How to do this shipping process through tact marketing?

It works with strong and resistant materials but with a smooth finish. This guarantees your customers that your clothing is of quality and is durable over time.
Use decorative elements when packing. Everything related to your brand.
Add decorative bags and you can even infuse them with the fragrance with which you want your client to associate the brand. Here you would be using two sensory strategies: touch and olfactory.
How you protect the items you send is a form of tact as well. Your client will make sure to observe how careful you have been with fragile shipments of materials such as glass, metal, plastic, leather, etc.

How do sensory marketing strategies influence customer loyalty?

For a company or brand to start increasing its sales, it has to stop focusing only on the monetary value that its product can have.

A customer who has had a satisfactory shopping experience will pay whatever it takes to receive: attention, friendliness, commitment, respect, and education.

It is for this reason that a company must have brand values and emotions associated with it, without this sooner or later it will be doomed to failure. In a world where the user wants to have a totally rewarding experience, not using strategies associated with the five senses is a mistake.

Examples of brands that have used sensory marketing strategies

As a brand, you can use a single sensory strategy or combine them with each other. Let’s read how some brands did it:

Ford

This brand, known for selling new and used cars, was having some difficulty selling second-hand cars specifically. What sensory marketing strategies did you apply as a company? They created a unique fragrance to spray on used cars. Do you think it was the touch that your sales were needing? The numbers speak for themselves.

Dunkin ‘Donuts

This donut franchise had a clever idea. I join two sensory strategies: sound and smell. Although they specialize in selling donuts, coffee is also an important part. This was not selling as much as they expected so they got to work with the increase in these sales.

The company was responsible for creating an advertising message on buses that had stops near Dunkin Donuts establishments. Similar to Pavlov’s experiment and the salivating dog used the association method.

Every time riders will hear the donut commercial on buses, it will eventually give off a fragrance. Following this strategy, coffee sales at bus stops near Dunkin Donuts increased 26%.

Coca-Cola

The most important soft drink company bets a lot on the sensory and taste experience that it can have in the lives of its customers. If you look at their logo in ad campaigns, the masterminds under them know how many drops to use to create the feeling of thirst.

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