In the past few years, there have been great advances in technology and digital developments that have contributed immensely to the breakthrough of experiential marketing. However, many companies are still a little skeptical about the use of experiential marketing (XM) due to the perceived difficulty of tracking the success of a campaign or program.
Nevertheless, the growing popularity of experiential marketing is making them change their minds and many now see that XM has proven to be an important part of a 360 omnichannel approach allowing brands to reach their customers’ hearts as well as a great way of collecting valuable data during activations.
In fact, events are an excellent way to improve your visibility, celebrate a success and connect with potential customers on a deeper level. The future of event planning revolves around data and metrics.
The real challenge here lies in understanding your KPIs and determining if your activation earned a positive return-on-investment (ROI). Luckily, with solid planning, clear goals and accurate data collection tools, you can maximize your ROI and help your business grow.
Experiential marketing (also known as engagement marketing) is a marketing strategy that bridges the gap between brands and their consumers by allowing them to participate in an experience that connects them emotionally with the brand.
Experiential campaigns come in different forms (mobile tours, brand activations, product sampling, street marketing and more) and seek to strengthen the relationship with their customers by engaging with them and making them participate in the evolution of the brand.
By connecting with the customer in an authentic and relatable way, experiential campaigns engage all five senses, sparking emotions in the consumer that contribute to fostering long-lasting relationships.
Organizing an activation or event allows the customer to interact directly with your brand in person and experience it in a unique way that wouldn’t be possible using traditional marketing methods. Plus, it allows you to collect data and gain valuable consumer insights that could prove very useful to attract new customers and increase brand loyalty.
Have you wondered why we miss going to live concerts and why listening to a concert of our favorite artist from home does not come close to the real thing ? Same thing for football, why is the game better in the stadium rather than on TV?
Well, that’s what we call the power of experience. There’s something completely unique about participating and being part of something rather than just passively witnessing it from afar. The sensation of being present and enjoying the moment wakes up your senses and makes experiences memorable and powerful.
At its core, experiential marketing is all about creating experiences and building a connection between a brand and its customers. For customers, being able to directly interact with a brand creates some sense of closeness and engagement, which strengthens brand loyalty. As a matter of fact, 74% of consumers say that engaging in branded event marketing experiences makes them more likely to buy a company’s products or services.
For brands, experiential marketing campaigns are a powerful strategy because they allow them to build brand awareness, durable relationships with customers and increase direct sales. Indeed, 65% of brands say that their experiential marketing campaigns lead to direct sales.
Successful experiential marketing campaigns not only introduce new customers to your brand but also turn your established customers into brand ambassadors thanks to the power of word-of-mouth.
No matter how small or big the event is, all you need to do is make sure that the people who are attending live a unique experience. With the right amount of creativity and communication tools, a small event can have a big impact even if just a handful of people participate in it.
The key here is to make sure you control all aspects of your event and make sure to build an online dialogue around it. A great way to do this is to leverage consumer-facing applications (CFAs), which will bridge the gap between experiential marketing (XM) and social media.
This will allow the experience to last longer by extending the length of time and engagement of customers. At the same time, you will be collecting data and that will help build your story and prove the ROI of the investment. Here are some of the elements that are good to track.
Customer experience or CX is the impression your customers have when they interact with your brand as a whole through all the interactions across the buyer’s journey.
CX is the result of every interaction the customer has with your brand, from scrolling through your website to talking to customer service representatives and actually buying the product/service from you. So, it’s essential to keep in mind that every action you take can impact your customer’s perception positively or negatively.
A positive customer experience requires a customer-centric mindset and is crucial to the success of any company, because a happy customer is one who is most likely going to become loyal and recommend your brand to others.
The two elements of customer experience are perception and interaction. One affects the other, so in order to create long-lasting positive perceptions; the company must engage and create fruitful interactions that emphasize the brand’s values.
Customer experience has become a key differentiator for brands. Delivering an excellent customer experience and being able to track it and measure it is essential for brands that want to take their activations to the next level and boost their visibility.
Every brand designs a unique customer journey for its activations and in order to track the customer experience, it must identify the various touchpoints where a customer interacts with its brand. This allows the company to establish baselines to measure future performance.
Effective customer experience tracking goes beyond the physical site of the activation. In this sense, you must also measure the impact of your activation on sales, social media engagement, contest subscriptions, rewards, coupon redemption…
There are various metrics used to evaluate the success of an event, also known as key performance indicators (KPIs).
“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” – Michael Porter
You have to make sure to choose the most relevant KPIs according to your business goals and what you were hoping to accomplish. However, in order to guide you, here are some general metrics that you can use to measure the effectiveness of any experiential marketing campaign.
You can evaluate the success of your event by measuring the conversion rate versus the retention rate. In fact, the conversion rate is key to profit. It tells you the percentage of customers who have taken a desired action: how many signups occurred, how many samples were given out…
The retention rate, on the other hand, informs you of the number of clients who have turned from normal customers to regular loyal customers. Both of these metrics are an effective way to track the customer experience – the higher they are, the better the customer experience.
Another way to measure your customer experience is to analyze reactions and sentiments. You can use customer surveys to determine if the customers had a positive experience if they enjoyed their time and how satisfied or happy they were to share that experience with your brand.
You can also measure how likely they are to promote your brand to their friends, family, colleagues based on the experience they just had. A simple survey kiosque at the exit of your activation can help track this.
The location you chose for your event can give you great customer insight about their experience. Was it a high traffic location or event sponsorship activation, if so, how did the customer flow through your space, how much time was spent in each place, how was the foot traffic… By listing the key metric for your brand beforehand, your brand ambassador will be able to keep track and report back with the data that is most valuable for your brand.
Social media and its viral characteristic will give you a lot of insights on the customer’s experience. You should check through your social media channels how much content was created at your event, how the engagement was on this content, which consumers, influencers shared content related to your event, what was the total number of impressions generated by the event. Multiple platforms exist to keep track of your social media traffic and engagement effectively. Plus, there are solutions for every budget!
Your staff can also give you valuable information about your customer experience during the event, by sharing the qualitative feedback they received from the attendees and their interactions with them, what they think could’ve been better, if the consumers had a certain issue that they complained about…
All of these metrics will help you track your customer experience and get a clear idea of the results of your event. Using a variety of KPIs to capture data will help you determine the success of your event and point out areas of improvement for future activations.
“Maybe stories are just data with a soul.” ~Brené Brown
Collecting data at your activation is a time and money savior. In fact, once you start collecting your data, it will be much easier for you to know whether your activation has achieved its purpose or not. And, when you start doing this at each of your events, you’ll start noticing patterns and be able to develop a better promotional strategy and know what kind of events bring the best results for your brand. Moreover, the data you gathered before, during and after an event will allow you to determine if you’ve achieved a full return on your investment (ROI).
In order for you to determine if your event has earned a significant ROI, you must set, before the start of your event and the data collection, an event goal, it could be increasing brand awareness, rewarding loyal customers… Having all of this information will help you create an efficient data strategy, streamline your marketing process and ensure you have the right tools before your event takes place.
Return on Investment… or as we like to say in our industry Return on Event (ROE), is one of the most important things you will be left with post-event. Understanding how to measure it will not only allow you to secure and increase the budget for the upcoming events but also give you real insight into how customers are interacting with your brand. This will help you make smarter decisions for the next ones.
There are a lot of things to be measured when you are trying to evaluate your ROI (in our case ROE), and they can be put into these three categories:
To highlight a few, have you collected event attendance, number of referrals and conversions achieved, number of leads generated, number of sales made by the event…
In this sense, there are many ways to collect valuable data at events or during an brand activation such as survey kiosks, analytical tools, net promoter scores, mobile event apps, CRM, etc. Here are some of the best ones:
Event surveys are a collection of subjective feedback from attendees during or after the event. They are in the form of a questionnaire where the participant answers multiple-choice or open-ended questions about their customer experience. They can be live or virtual and be performed during the activation or afterward via email or other touch points.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is often presented as an indicator of customer satisfaction since it tells you the percentage of customers that are likely to recommend a product, a brand or service to their friends and family. It gives you a direct perception of the customer’s experience.
Geo tracking is the process for positioning the customer on a plan or a map, perhaps on the event using its geographic coordinates. It can show you the itinerary of a client during your event or during the festival you attended with your brand activation.
Mobile polygoning uses the location history of each distinct mobile user in your event to provide you advanced location insight reports and demographic insights as well. Polygons also measure in-store visits for devices to track a campaign’s success. This can allow you to track if someone visited your store or restaurant following an activation they attended.
Mobile event apps are especially launched for the event in question where attendees can ask questions in the app and enable discussions, get real-time alerts, etc. This will help you gather data around the questions asked and boost engagement and customer satisfaction.
Data management helps businesses create value from analyzing and exploiting the data collected during the event.
Finally, when you’re planning to implement experiential marketing campaigns in your marketing strategy, you must keep in mind that the success of these relies on you producing personalized programs that suit your brand and leveraging key practices that will ensure you the best results while leaving room for improvement during and in between activations. Putting the emphasis on data collection during events and making it a routine will take your events from great to extraordinary.
P.S: It is important to mention that before using any of these tools; the company should be 100% transparent with their customers and give them full disclosure on the procedures they’re about to take action on (whether their identity will remain anonymous or not, if there is recording or filming happening…).
Prime Marketing has over two decades of experience organizing stellar experiential marketing campaigns and events for brands in Canada and the United States. The Sky’s the limit… let us communicate the values of your brand in the most creative and efficient way.