Many marketers have grappled with a challenging question: How do you measure the effectiveness of an experiential campaign? With in-store experiences, the answer is often straightforward due to tangible data like sales and loyalty card numbers. However, for out-of-home experiences like festivals or sports stadiums, the solutions aren't as clear-cut.
We understand these challenges. Here, we'll provide a roadmap to quantify your experiential campaigns effectively, assuring marketeers of its pivotal role in the marketing mix.
As with any campaign, setting well-defined goals is the best place to start. Whether aiming to increase brand awareness or improve sales over a defined period, having rock-solid targets allows you to implement the best ways to measure them.
Some solid objectives for experiential campaigns include increasing brand sentiment, loyalty, and intent to purchase.
You should also ensure your experiential activation aligns with your brand’s overall strategy. This alignment will shape the core of each experience.
The next step is to work out the best ways to measure what you’ve set out to achieve. NPS scores are a helpful tool to measure brand sentiment following an experiential campaign. Tracking inputs like footfall numbers, samples distributed, or people engaged against outputs such as brand advocates following the experience gives you visceral figures.
Technologies such as geofencing or facial recognition tracking are effective methods to capture data to measure these metrics.
You can track ROI successfully through various approaches. One effective method is comparing conversion to retention rates, which you can implement using coupons as incentives to drive shoppers towards making purchases. You can gain valuable insights into sales performance by tracking sales and redemption figures. Plus, you can see how many consumers have taken the desired action, such as signing up for brand loyalty programmes.
Don't overlook the power of press coverage and media impressions. Paired with a solid PR strategy and CRM data, you can gain an in-depth understanding of your campaign's reach.
Tracking over multiple platforms is straightforward, easy to quantify and data-rich. Using experience-specific hashtags gives a clear overview of engagement and reach over an extended period, both during and pre-and post-campaign. After all, the potential scope of online boosts your experience to an even wider audience, so utilise this! Supporting experiential with a robust social marketing strategy gives you a foolproof way to track an experience’s effectiveness.
Customer surveys offer insights into campaign perceptions and potential purchasing decisions. You can narrow down intent to purchase and find out exactly where your customer is planning to buy from.
Anecdotal feedback is as helpful as quantitative feedback to determine whether the experience hit your targets. Asking the right questions to find the golden nuggets of responses give you a robust overview of participants’ sentiment. Mobile event apps can further enhance this qualitative collection.
Consider the location of your event. The interplay of foot traffic and engagement times can provide crucial data.
Compare your current campaign data with historical benchmarks to discover the effectiveness of your campaign. Use intensive data analysis to find meaningful insights. Pay attention to patterns, trends and correlations so you can pinpoint areas for improvement and the strengths of your experiences.
Plus, leveraging predictive analytics and AI integrations help measure potential ROI and determine the feasibility of campaigns before they even go live!
In today's digital era, harnessing data is paramount. Brandsthat prioritize data-driven insights will position themselves ahead of thecurve. As you dive into experiential marketing, remember to look beyondimmediate results. It's the lasting impact on brand perception, loyalty, andadvocacy that truly determines success. And as experts in the field, we're hereto guide you every step of the way.
