How to measure experiential marketing success
Experiential marketing is aimed at influencing perceptions of a brand, which means it is notoriously hard to measure success. Some metrics, such as sales and online mentions, can be easy to track and quantify, but how do you get an accurate overview of brand sentiment following an event? While tricky, calculating experiential marketing return on investment (ROI) is important to understand the outcome of your event and guide the planning of future experiences.
Here’s an overview of how to measure experiential marketing success.
Determine clear goals
To measure success you first need to know what success is. Planning a great experiential marketing campaign requires a lot of imagination alongside clearly defined goals to channel that creative power.
Consider questions such as:
- What would the outcome of a successful campaign look like for your brand?
- How will you track and monitor your goals?
Knowing what you’re aiming for, whether that be conversions, exposure or strong brand loyalty will enable you to more accurately judge success post-event.
What does success look like for your brand? Photo: SeePort Festival, 2018.
Attendance and participation
One of the most apparent experiential marketing metrics is attendance numbers. The number of people who show up is a clear indication of the interest you have generated, and higher numbers obviously mean more brand awareness. However, equally as important as the quantity is how involved each attendee was while there. During the event, you should take steps to gauge participation and how actively people are engaged.
For example, some of the tools you use during the event, such as touch screen monitors, can track interaction data and give you an overview of participation once the event has concluded.
Tracking social media engagement is a way of measuring the reach of the event.
Social media engagement
As well as physical attendance, you can also look at how many people show up to the party online. Tracking social media engagement is an accurate way of measuring the reach of the event and roughly how many people have been exposed to your brand.
Observing and quantifying the chatter online is a necessary component of any experiential marketing campaign. The benefits are twofold – likes and shares will give you the numerical data you need to track engagement and success, while reactions to the event can give you unfiltered feedback in real time. People can be incredibly honest with their opinions on social media so it’s a great forum to find out exactly what people are thinking of the event.
A man sharing the event on his social media. FIFA U-20 World Cup NZ, 2015.
Social media is also a useful tool for observing how successful your brand experience was in keeping people engaged for the longer term. Brand experiences are about sustained impact and cultivating lasting loyalty rather than just grabbing customers’ attention for a moment. A spike in activity before, during and immediately after the event is great, but how are people engaging with your business weeks or months later? A truly successful experiential marketing campaign will lodge your brand in people’s consciousness – and social media spheres – for long after the event has wrapped up.
Customer feedback
Similarly to social media, customer feedback will allow you look at how successful the event was. Although brand sentiment is one of the most important goals behind your event, it is one of the most difficult things to monitor. In order to establish whether you have succeeded in building positive associations with your brand, you can carry out brand awareness research via customer feedback surveys.
Feedback is a direct source of information from the people you are trying to target – they will let you know in their own words whether the event was a success.
As experts in putting together creative and boundary-pushing events, I Want Orange know what a successful brand experience looks like. Get in touch with our friendly team today and we’ll help get your brand name out there.