How Do You Measure The ROI Of Experiential Marketing?
Marketing is one of those things that most business owners know they need to do, and they might even know what good marketing looks like, but a lot aren’t really sure how it’s all measured. And so they keep doing what they’re doing, with no real idea of if it’s working or not, and if it’s generating them a profit, or if it’s actually making them a loss. As a result, many businesses still don’t understand how to really maximise the value of their marketing, or even how to use it effectively at all.
That all goes double for experiential marketing – something that can be even more challenging to measure if you don’t know how. But luckily for you, we know exactly how to monitor the performance of experiential marketing. In fact, we do it every day. Here are some of our best tips to help you get started.
Get Your KPIs Clear
Just like any marketing campaign, the first thing you need to do with experiential marketing is ask yourself what you’re trying to achieve. Having a clear set of goals in place means you can plan every element of your campaign to meet those goals, and you can put measures in place to track your performance.
There are a lot of different aims you could have in mind for your campaign. For example, you could want to increase brand awareness in a certain area or even a certain shop. You could be looking to improve sales and retention over a defined period. You could be looking to gather feedback on your product so that you can improve it. Whatever your aim, having some solid objectives for the campaign will help you choose and implement the best ways to measure them. One thing we will say is that you should always make sure that your aims align with your brand’s overall strategy.
Define Your Metrics
The next step in your journey is to work out the best ways to measure your progress towards achieving your goals. What that looks like will be different depending on what your KPIs are. If you want to track brand sentiment and loyalty, then NPS scores can be a very helpful tool. Physical tracking like footfall, number of samples distributed or feedback buttons pressed can all provide you with clear-cut data that you can analyse and use. You can even use more advanced technology like geofencing and facial recognition to capture your data.
Choose which metrics you will use to track against your KPIs, and the methods you’ll use to collect them.
Design & Optimise Tracking
Now that you understand what you’re tracking and why, you can develop a process for doing it. There are a lot of different ways you can do this, but one of the most effective is comparing conversion to retention rates. You do this by using coupons as incentives to drive shoppers towards making that initial purchase. You can then analyse the sales performance by tracking sales and redemption figures. You can also monitor how many consumers have taken an action, like signing up for brand loyalty programmes or newsletters, or even ordered online.
You can track your metrics over multiple different platforms in a simple way that gives you easy-to-quantify, rich data. For example, set up experience-specific hashtags to give a clear view of engagement online with your campaign, and monitor reach during and after your campaign is over. If you’re pairing your experience with a social media strategy, then the measurement tools are already built in and waiting for you to use them.
Embrace Qualitative Data
It isn’t all about statistics and figures. Customer surveys offer valuable insights into how your customers perceive you and your campaign, and what factors are influencing their purchasing decisions – including if they are planning to purchase, where from and when. Even things like location and the interplay between foot traffic and engagement times can provide you with crucial information.
On top of that, anecdotal feedback can be one of your most valuable assets for future product development and marketing. By talking to your customers and prospects, you can understand if your experience hit your targets, gather nuggets of information and build a robust overview of participants’ sentiment.
Analyse, Analyse and Analyse Again
This is an excellent time to rely on technology to help you. Predictive analytics and even AI tools can help you a lot with this. The key is to analyse your data in a number of ways to find meaningful insights. Pay attention to patterns, trends and correlations you find so that you can pinpoint areas for improvement, as well as the areas that your experiences are very strong in.
In the digital world we live in, it’s never been easier to collect data. Even for very hands-on, face-to-face things like experiential marketing, you still have the ability to track and collect information that can tell you how well it went.
If you’re still feeling a bit lost when it comes to measuring experiential marketing, you can always contact an expert to help. At Fizz Experience we’ve been in the experiential marketing business for over 30 years, so we know how to put on a good demo, and how to track the event as we go. We work with brands to help them track and manage both the quantifiable facts (like how many people visited your stand and how many people bought your product that day), and the non-qualifiable factors, like the fond memories and positive feelings demos can create, which lead to higher profits. If you would like to know more about experiential marketing and what it can do for your brand, just get in touch with the team today, and we would be happy to help.
