Experiential Marketing ROI Part 2: A Guide to Proving and Improving

This is the second part of our guide on how to prove and improve ROI/ROO reporting for experiential marketing campaigns.

Establish Your Main Objectives

The first step to any experiential or live marketing activation is defining the core objective(s) of your campaign. Are you only looking for the most qualified sales ready leads? Or to engage consumers as advocates of your brand?

1. Sales Enablement

Sales enablement processes break down quickly as traffic per event or the number of events increase. For a sales enablement strategy, your return lies in the ability to capture as many customers as possible and instantly filter qualified leads directly to sales teams, ambassadors, or dealers.

2. Sales Experience

A brand experience strategy can include a variety of events that are not limited to product samplings, VIP events and tours. The core principle of brand experiences is offering a seamless and premium package with custom data capture abilities. The true return comes through unique consumer journeys that produce valuable consumer insight and a heightened perception of the brand.

3. Lead Generation

Live marketing software allows an unlimited number of engagement points that include both kiosk and CSR mediums. The return on any lead generation strategy focuses on finding as many relevant engagements as possible and following up with those leads in a timely and personalized manner.

4. Social Enhancement

Live marketing software supports native photo capture capabilities and integrated social sharing so advocates can share their personalized experiences as they interact with your brand. The key to tangible return revolves around moving social engagements into face-to-face conversations where insights and analytics can be captured or the conversation can continue.

Define Data-Driven Key Performance Indicators

Brands, sponsorship executives and agencies may thrive on the currency of “media value”, but impression metrics have limited the insight and evolution of sponsorship strategy. It's time for experiential marketing to embrace performance metrics and focus on data-driven performance measures:

1. Cost Per 1000

Custom tech solutions or assets built on a campaign basis can quickly inflate the cost of live marketing activities without a tangible increase in engagement numbers. Live marketing software will greatly reduce the time and cost associated with gaining a higher volume of engagements.

2. Engagement/Leads by Rep

Live marketing software ensures your lead by representative analysis maintains data integrity. Reported leads are valid entries and those entries are continously tied to the representative that captured them.

3. Number of Engagements (YOY)

Not only does experiential marketing software enable year over year comparisons, but also improves results as your digital costs remain fixed regardless of the number of assets you execute.

4. Conversion Ratio

Live marketing software ensures leads are accurate and qualified onsite so you can track the full consumer journey. This means you know exactly when and how leads convert.

Leverage Digital To Unify Reporting

Fragmented data, manual reporting and a lack of transparency are causing many experiential marketers to lag behind the general marketing industry when it comes to reporting and analytics. Live marketing software has changed the experience and reporting landscape. Today, success is measured in weeks or days rather than quarters or years. By using experiential marketing software you access 3 key neccesities for proper ROI reporting:

1. Uniform Data

The ability to collect and harmonize campaign indicators across channels, combining siloed data from multiple sources, can prove extremely difficult. Leverage experiential marketing software to standardize data collection across your campaign. By integrating digital assets with one another, and across channels, you enable reporting in a unified manner with consistent attribution.

2. Automatic Campaign Reporting

Digital devices can save data, within their own memory or wirelessly transfer captured data to a comprehensive database. With experiential marketing software you instantly transform raw user data into actionable consumer insights and visual analytics. Using universal validation and fewer transcriptions will minimize the opportunity for data loss.

3. More Transparency

It is now possible to access deeper transparency with live marketing software. Results can be shared across parties at any time. Real time transparency allows you to change campaign assets and procedures during live activations. This improves performance and build stronger relationships.

Stay tuned for part 3 of this guide, and catch up on part 1 here!