More Americans are suffering from "ad fatigue" -- and it's contagious. Ad block usage grew 30 percent in 2016, and 11 percent of web users block ads on the internet. In short, traditional marketing is dead, and many consumers stopped paying attention to ads a long time ago. As a result, more brands are investing in digital sponsorship activations -- interactive experiences that resonate with prospects more effectively than conventional marketing messages.
This type of marketing is difficult to master, but it could provide companies with a hefty return on their digital ad spend. Here are three ways marketing executives can move beyond simply measuring brand awareness and use data to improve the effectiveness of their sponsorship activations.
Less than half of all marketers have a standardized process for measuring their sponsorship campaigns.
Digital analytics drive sponsorship campaigns, and this is where good software comes in. The best live marketing technology lets users collaborate with employees and partners in one place, register and check-in consumers at live events, capture valuable customer data and personalize communications for event attendees.
Many companies benefit from software that hosts their data in one place. Forty-eight percent of marketers who use CRM or marketing automation discover correlations from various data sources, 46 percent predict customer behavior and trends, and 40 percent predict product or service sales.
Brands can also fuse data analytics with the latest digital technology. Some marketers, for example, place giant digital dashboards in front of their booth at live events, so attendees and staff can see important information in real-time.
"[By] monitoring engagement data on real-time activity dashboards, you can now see how things are shaping up across your event," says Brand Quarterly magazine. "Instant visualizations display traffic flow; sponsors who are hitting their targets (or not); lines building up at registration; sessions that are resonating most or least with attendees; offers delivering the highest on-site conversion; most influential delegates; sentiments about exhibits, keynotes, food and more."
Sponsorship activations have a limited target audience. Trade shows, exhibits, samplings -- all of these experiences attract a relatively small number of people. Marketing executives can now increase their visibility by live streaming experiential marketing event on the internet.
Sponsors can fund these events, and boost exposure of their brand, too. Live streaming is a powerful marketing hack for sponsorship activations. Eighty percent of customers would rather watch a live video from a company than read their blog, while 82 percent prefer live videos to social media posts.
More event organizers are installing photo booths at special events to improve consumer engagement. Attendees step inside one of these booths, have their picture taken and receive a photo -- the ultimate memento from an event.
These party accessories are a fantastic way to improve experiential marketing, too. Whether it's a trade show, exhibition or in-store promotional event, photo booths are a marketing executive's best friend. In order to receive their photo, guests will usually fill out a form with their personal details or like a company on social media. As a result, brands and customers both benefit from this experiential marketing tactic.
Adidas is just one company that has used photo booths for live event marketing. At the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, the sportswear brand installed a booth at the Westfield Stratford City shopping mall. Soccer star David Beckham surprised guests when he suddenly appeared from a hidden section of the booth -- something that garnered much media coverage.
Recent technological developments have popularized the moving photo booth, which produces animated GIFs instead of conventional images. Event organizers can also provide guests with props -- costumes, hats, cardboard speech bubbles, accessories, etc. -- or include their brand logo on photos.
These three sponsorship activation hacks are essential weapons in any marketing executive's arsenal. Brands should explore analytics software, invest in live streaming and use interactive photo booths for more productive, lucrative sponsorship campaigns.
Marketing executives who optimize and automate their sponsorship opportunities generate sales, predict customer behavior and drive business growth. Companies who continue to rely on old marketing methods, on the other hand, will soon become irrelevant. Measuring brand awareness is no longer good enough; brands need to get smarter about how to reach audiences if they are to prove real results.