So you've just created the ultimate experiential event. You've booked the venue, updated your social media pages and sent out hundreds of invitations.
So far, so good.
But just how you are going to measure the return on your investment?
In a recent webinar, chief financial officer and co-founder of Limelight Russ Armstrong spoke to two marketing experts about how to optimize your experiential ROI — and their insights that might surprise you.
Measuring the success of your event is simple, right? Wrong. Most marketers — 63 percent, in fact — can't prove the short-term impact of their campaigns quantitatively. Even worse, 69 percent can't demonstrate the long-term impact of marketing spending.
What gives?
The problem, perhaps, lies with the tools and software that marketers use for their experiential campaigns. These applications just aren't good enough.
Here's everything you need to know about measuring ROI properly.
In traditional advertising, there are tons of metrics to measure your campaigns. Product performance, sales growth, customer retention rate — you name it.
Measuring experiential, on the other hand, is a little trickier.
"Experiential is really new, and there's not necessarily an agreed format for measuring it," says Christian Gani, vice president of development at Match Marketing Group.
Consumers are wary about handing out their personal details to marketers at live events, adds Gani. They don't seek out to engage with brands or spokespeople. They don't always want to follow a brand. Or like it. Or share it.
Connecting with event attendees on a deeper level, however, will provide you with the kind of data you need to measure your campaigns.
"One of the questions we ask ourselves here is 'Are we getting through to consumers?' To get their attention, we need content that resonates at that moment."
Traditional methods for measuring experiential have flaws. Marketers focus on quantity, rather than quantity — and, as a result, are unable to properly measure their campaigns.
"We're not just collecting that data for the sake of having data," says Scot Wheeler, senior vice president of advanced analytics at Match Marketing Group. "We're collecting that data to drive it back into a plan."
Research suggests marketers struggle with too much data. Forty-seven percent of them find turning data into insights a major challenge, while 45 percent stumble when it comes to turning insights into actionable segments. Another study reveals that 97 percent of organizations use data to drive business opportunities, but only 44 percent of them trust that data enough to make important business decisions.
"We've heard for a long time that data is the new oil, but just having an oil well doesn't accomplish anything," says Wheeler. "You need to find someone who can take your data upstream, someone who can refine it."
Streamlining your tech stack will make event measurement so much easier. Get rid of all of those unnecessary applications, and invest in just two programs: customer relationship management software and experiential software.
Customer relationship management software — or CRM, for short — lets you track customers at live events. "I'm sure most people will be familiar with this," says Russ Armstrong. "SalesForce, Dynamics, Sugar, ESP, Oracle — whatever system you might be using, leveraging your CRM is key to tracking that 360-degree view of your consumer and all your different channels."
Research shows that, without CRM, 79 percent of leads fail to convert.
"Traditionally, data through CRM systems have been generated from online activities like emails and shopping carts," adds Armstrong. "But to truly understand your consumer, you also need to start plugging in your experiential data, event data and social data."
While CRM systems are great for tracking consumers, they can't track specific details about live events like total attendance, invites, leads, contest entries, social media sentiment, booth dwell time and live impressions. This is where experiential software comes in. It lets you customize your marketing campaigns and engage with prospects.
"This software captures data before it hits your CRM system," says Armstrong. "If you're running thousands of events over the course of a year, you need a place to house all that data and aggregate it. It's a key component of your technology stack."
Standardized Data Sets vs. Normalized Data Sets
Now you've simplified your tech stack, what data should you collect?
Remember, not all experiential campaigns are the same. They have different budgets and different outcomes. Standardized data sets, however, let you set benchmarks and comparative analysis for your live events and categorize experiential campaigns. "You can compare apples to apples when you're analyzing your data," says Armstrong.
Normalized data sets, on the other hand, provide you with an overview of your campaigns across different variables like attendance, captured leads and hand raisers. "You might have an event where a thousand people might come and an event where a hundred people come. Normalized data sets provide you with ratios that let you compare these two events."
More marketers are struggling when it comes to measuring experiential ROI. Streamlining your tech stack, however, and using an experiential marketing system will let you capture and store all of your data in one place and gain valuable intelligence about your event attendees. Plus, using both standardized and normalized data sets will provide you with in-depth consumer insights so you can draw worthwhile conclusions from your experiential campaigns.
