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?
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:
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.
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:
It’s challenging, but doing so can give you valuable insight into how people perceive your brand.
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:
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.
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.