You’re all aboard the experiential train, creating live activations that captivate your customers. However, there’s that little problem of measuring ROI and KPIs.
It’s the information that your boss actually cares about. Forget about your pretty pop-up installation for a second. Having quantifiable measurements in place will help you determine if the campaign was a success. So how do you go about measuring that?
Define What Success Means to You
You can’t measure success if you don’t know what success looks like for your experiential marketing campaign.
First things first - define it. Here are some ways you could characterise your triumphs:
- Lead generation: do you want to capture names and emails? Specify the information you need and a way to collate that.
- Brand awareness: are you trying to break into a new industry or reach a new target market? Specify the demographic and make sure to do some research.
- Increased sales: are you selling products during the event? How long will you measure sales after the event is over?
Whatever you decide for your campaign, make sure you’re harnessing relevant data the right way. These key metrics you’ll capture can be analysed and used to drive profitability. They can also be utilised when improving future event ROI.
This information can result in innovations that have a real impact. In a world where everybody's waking up to the incredible results of experiential marketing, it’s beneficial to have the data to get ahead and stay there.
Make Sure Your ROI Is Measurable
When a marketer implements a new PPC campaign or SEO strategy, it’s pretty easy to gather the data to measure their success. With a basic comparison of analytics, the marketer can determine whether the ad clicks have increased or the website rankings have improved.
However, how does the marketer measure that success when it comes to innovative advertising that ranges from pop-up shops to special installations? While it’s not likely to be as easy as looking at Google Analytics or spreadsheets, measuring ROI for experiential marketing can be done. Here's how:
- Put Measurement Into Your Budget: establish the baseline level of awareness or engagement up-front. You should also measure once your campaign is over.
- Build Measurement Into Your Campaign: do some clever planning beforehand to make measurement easier. If your brand does giveaways, then make sure to collect emails and contact details of survey attendees. However you interact with attendees, design your event in a way so you can record valuable data. Otherwise, you could miss out.
- Measure Real Objectives: avoid asking questions which give you useless data - what are you going to do with that? Make sure to design a way to measure the metrics your brand can actually benefit from.
- Build Money Into Metrics: if your brand wants to increase leads and engagement, it’s not enough to just count these metrics. You need to ask how much it costs to get the leads or engagement for your campaign and how you can minimise those.
It’s challenging, but doing so can give you valuable insight into how people perceive your brand.
Choose Relevant KPIs
When choosing which KPIs to measure, it’s important to look beyond the usual suspects: number of attendees, number of product purchases or number of email captures.
These are still essential to track, but they won’t give you a clear idea of how successful your event really was.
Flocks of attendees don't necessarily translate to more sales or even increased brand awareness. Going deeper can give you much better insight into what actually worked - and what didn’t.
The employees or hired staff will have to be in on your definition of success too. For example, staff who will be handing out product samples will need to keep track of how many they give out.
If you have exhibitions that participants will be interacting with, like a 3D virtual reality demo, make sure you have some way of counting how many people are actively engaged. You can do this by adding a simple start button that needs to be pressed before it begins.
Tracking softer KPIs, like brand sentiment, can certainly be trickier. But it can be done.
While the sentiment is subjective, pay attention to how people are interacting with them and what they’re saying about the brand. This can give you a good idea of how people feel about your brand.
Increasing sales is generally an easier thing to measure, sample KPIs include:
- Product sales and samples during and after your activation.
- New customer purchases.
- Returning customer purchases.
You have all the information to measure experiential marketing, but what about everything else involved? From running a successful campaign to gaining exposure, we know there’s a lot you want to achieve from your activation.
That’s why we’ve created the ultimate experiential marketing playbook to help you out.
Get the Experiential Marketing Playbook
This guide has everything you could possibly need, from the benefits, tips on running your campaign, examples you can take inspiration from and loads more.
To get your own copy of this playbook and blow your competition out the water, click on the link below to get your copy.
