Let’s face it, first impressions are everything. This rings true for universities recruiting perspective students or athletes, in corporate lobbies as prospective clients or new hires walk through your doors, and it’s especially true in healthcare settings that need to create a feeling of trust and cutting edge technology and thinking. An immersive lobby experience that screams forward thinking processes, a well thought out and often personalized message, and the ability to communicate with all who enter it can be the difference between winning and losing new business, or even retaining a current client.
So what exactly makes a winning immersive lobby experience? Well, it’s a few things, but for the most part it comes down to the ability to communicate or even interact with visitors and an influx of cutting edge, immersive technology that can be a talking point for the visitors.
Create A Multipurpose Space. Today’s visitors need to be able to both conduct a formal conversation and also have an area to relax or be entertained with some form of branded entertainment. This means your lobby space should have an area where multiple people can sit and face one another for formal introductions, or a run-down of what they’re about to discuss once they go back to a conference room etc… This area should also provide ample ability for a visitor to plug in their laptop and conduct some work while they wait, or charge their phone before heading to the airport. All the while, there should be some form of branded information readily available and visible from the entire lobby. Which leads us to our next point.
Make Brand Communication a Priority. This can take the form of multiple technologies. Quite often we see LED walls in immersive lobby experiences. Large LED walls can be seen from nearly every angle within a lobby. Organizations can feature announcements, personalized welcome messages, the news of the day or even a video message from an executive team member. The content you share is equally important and you need to know your audience and who is going to be in the lobby that day to provide a certain level of personalization.
Make it Interactive. Having an interactive component will help to entertain and educate your visitors. You could create a touch-less interactive wall where a simple hover/swipe of the hand can change content or create an experience so unique that the visitor will be talking about it with friends and colleagues after they leave the space. We also see interactive story walls that show a company timeline, or a university’s journey through the years. These can be very educational as well. Read more about Bluewater’s recent story wall projects here
You could even make it social! Incorporating social media into the lobby environment allows brands to connect long-term with their visitors and also grow the brand reach far beyond the lobby while helping the marketing department reach goals of their own. Not to mention, social media based interactive spaces can allow visitors to connect with one another and create lifelong connections. We’ve even seen a popular hotel chain utilize “social walls” consisting of displays that presented social media posts by the hotel’s guests. The initiative reached an audience of approximately 100,000 social media users and created thousands of pieces of user generated content for the brand. We have also seen major brands that feature the ability for guests to connect to each other via their LinkedIn networks. These ideas both capture guests’ attention the moment they walk in the door and encourage future engagement, and will leave them talking about your brand for months to come.
For more information on how Bluewater can help you plan your next immersive lobby experience contact us any time for a free ideation session.
