Many companies that plan experiential marketing campaigns host brand activations with free samples, contests, and giveaways. However, brands rarely use these activations as an opportunity to collect data and engage with consumers on a deeper level, instead of simply raising awareness. In this blog post, we’ll cover 10 big reasons you should be collecting data at EVERY activation.
Brand awareness is important. That said, you spend a lot of money on hiring brand ambassadors, giving away free products, and creating activations and experiences for consumers—so you need to have a real return on investment that you can track, understand, and measure. Collecting consumer data provides a return on your investment.
Whenever you’re collecting information, your brand ambassadors are interacting with and have more one-on-one face time with consumers. This increases the chances that consumers will spend more time engaging with your brand ambassadors, providing their information, and gives your brand ambassadors more opportunities to have conversations with them.
Every single person who comes to your event is a marketing opportunity for your brand, and the only way you’ll be able to market to them in the future is to capture their data and add their information to your database. Even if you just collect their name and email address, you’ll be able to send them emails, offers, and invite them to future brand activations.
Brands are always searching for consumer insights, which are extremely difficult to get. Experiential marketing activations are a perfect way to get that valuable feedback on your products. Add more form fields, asking consumers how they liked the product, if they would recommend your activation to a friend, and why they do or don't use your product. Based on your consumer feedback, your R&D team can then work to improve on those elements.
We discussed obtaining consumer feedback on your products above, but product feedback isn’t the only valuable insights you can gain. You can get feedback about the activation itself, what is the consumer’s opinion of your company, and what’s their buyer persona? What demographics are they coming from, and how can you change their perception of your brand?
Understanding your audience is critical so you’ll know who you’re marketing to, and who is attending your activations. Collecting data will help you determine audience demographics, age groups, interests, and their knowledge of your brand. Adding in a few simple form fields asking questions about the audience are extremely crucial.
The information you collect from your activations allows you to progressively profile consumers each time they attend one of your activations. You can then build your marketing strategy around the data you collect to help your marketing team know what they need to do to convert these consumers into qualified leads.
Plain and simple, the more information you can collect, the more you can use the information to determine if someone fits your buyer persona, and if they’ll make a purchase. The more information you can gather, the more you can focus on the best leads to target.
The more you know about each person who comes to your activation, the better your sales team can pinpoint what they need to say, and what they need to do to close a sale.
The more information you can gather about your activation, the more you’ll be able to create a deep analysis of your return on investment and obtain metrics on the people who attend and how your CSRs are performing, whether you're looking at event versus event, or your year-over-year results.
This means more than raising brand awareness. You need to see:
Experiential marketing allows you to use the data you collect to define a concrete and real return on investment and return on objectives. It holds marketers and experiential marketers accountable, justifies their budgets, and helps them quantify those results in getting data in the best possible way.
In our free ebook, The Definitive Guide to Experiential Marketing, you'll learn how the most progressive brands plan, run, measure and will scale their experiential marketing campaigns in 2020 - download it today!
