Any experiential marketing campaign you launch has visualizations of success and creative innovation reaping rewards. However, simply seeing people flock through the door and consume the live event or the immersive experience isn’t enough. Vanity metrics don’t count for much. We want tangible results so we can improve on what worked well. In this blog, we show you what experiential agencies London will help you track so you can see that your time, creativity, and money are well spent.
We’ve picked five metrics the experiential marketing agency will help you monitor. If you don’t need an agency to do the work for you, you can track and monitor the targets yourself if you have the right tools.
Just having people through the door is not enough, and for the most part that is true. If 300 people attend and not one engages with your brand, there is not much success from the event.
Therefore, you need to monitor the number of attendees and their level of interaction. Consider utilizing brand ambassadors, giveaways, and product testing during events. This way you can see what percentage of visitors are engaging with your event.
To get an idea of how much people engage when viewing or taking part in your activation you could:
Incorporating these experiential marketing measures will give you an idea of the impressions the event made on people. Furthermore, it can help drive brand awareness, and encourage sales.
The great thing about experiential marketing events is that they can be a hybrid event where the audience can be part of the in-person or virtual event experience. This opens up an opportunity for increasing reach and fresh ways for the audience to enjoy and consume the activation. In the run-up to the event, and throughout it, you should be looking at specific hashtags and checking their use. Look for mentions, shares, comments, and other posts across all social platforms. This allows you to assess what people are saying, what they are expecting, and what they think. Encourage user-generated content throughout the event.
Selfie booths, interactive displays, and more encourage photos and videos that people will gladly share. Attendees can live post these, and then your business can share them further during the activation. Alternatively, they are usable by your team on social media after the event as a “look at what you missed out on” type of post! Giving people the fear of missing out can be a great driver for your next experiential event. Consider who you may invite as well. Certain social media accounts hold strong followings and their role as influencers, their live broadcast, their review or their photos of your event could be a huge form of additional advertising.
Social media is also great for lead generation so consider downloads of the event to be made available afterward or use “exclusive” behind-the-scenes content to draw further engagement from those curious to learn more.
How your brand looks and how people relate to it can be largely shaped by experiential events. By encouraging live opinions throughout the event with product demonstrations, gamification, surveys, and analysis tools, you’ll be able to see how people perceive your product, your brand, and the event itself. This should also be incorporated into post-event marketing. Whether it's emailing thanking them for visiting, follow-ups on lead generation, or posting some engaging social media material reviewing the activation and including the audience, you’ll get a good idea of how people saw all that was going on.
As we said earlier, your experiential event has the chance to be multi-faceted and covers both in-person and online interaction. Your social campaigns and pre-event marketing should have built a buzz around your activation, but has it delivered? Monitor traffic to your site and see how long people spend there, what pages they visit, and how many actually convert from simple observers to tangible leads or genuine sales. Having record-breaking site visitors is something to be proud of but if it doesn’t convert to anything, you could have been targeting the wrong people at the wrong time or created an activation that just doesn’t resonate.
A technique adopted by many is to create event-specific landing pages and then check traffic to those. That then gives you an idea of who is engaging with the event itself rather than the brand as a whole.
Perhaps the most important metric overall is whether the money and time spent on the campaign has turned into sales, leads, or other monetary-based goals you may have set. In some cases, events are set up with the knowledge no money will be made directly off the back of them in the short term, but as part of a larger brand-building exercise revenue will increase in the future. You should establish before launch, what your aims or this campaign truly are, otherwise you could be putting your focus into all the wrong places!
Good question! If you have so many things to keep a handle on, how can you accurately monitor and measure them all? Luckily, experiential agencies can assist with this quite easily. Smyle, for example, a London-based agency, uses key reporting tools to help track all the metrics both they and their client feel valuable for the campaign.
This could include:
Implement campaign-based URLS by setting up specific landing pages, think about tracking pixels on your social pages and QR codes that are campaign-based only. These actions will all monitor interactions on items purely set for your activation.
Following up after an experiential campaign is essential. It really helps lead data-driven research for future events and shows you where this campaign succeeded. Feedback doesn’t have to just be after the events though. During any part of a hybrid campaign, your audience can actively take part in feedback by engaging in the interactive elements you have incorporated.
An experiential marketing agency will always have its fingers on the pulse with the best tech for measuring metrics. CRM platforms, analytics tools and event management systems can help monitor a bespoke set of metrics.
