Top Experiential Marketing Trends For Summer 2018

Marketing will always be an exciting field because the rules keep changing. Customer expectations periodically ramp up in response to intelligent innovations, technology is constantly learning more about purchase intent, and the lessons you can take from successful campaigns will change the market dynamic on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.

For summer 2018, here is a quick review of updates in the world in experiential marketing and the actionable insights that they imply.

Techniques for Proving ROI

A new report, For Good Measure: A Guide to Event ROI was just released by the branding specialists at AgencyEA. The central metaphor they introduced was that data collection is like flossing your teeth – everyone says they are doing it but very few actually do it effectively. The report covered topics such as the significance of customized KPIs, the importance of CRM for attribution, and how metric goals vary for different internal and external events.

The Next Generation of Marketing

An overview of experiential trends in Marketing Profs announced that “We're entering a new generation of experiential marketing that considers cultural context, program timing, content development, and positioning within a brand's long-term business objectives.” Other critical data points from their report included facts like:

Above Average Growth

Citing US Labor Statistics, Adweek reported the events industry will grow by 44 percent through 2020. That growth rate is much higher than most other industries they measured. The brand life from social sharing and referrals around incomparable customer experiences are essential drivers of that growth. Yet many brands continue to inadequate use their social muscle before, during, and after events.

AR Ready for Its Close Up

Augmented reality (AR) set-ups consistently rank as one of the hottest attention-grabbers at trade shows and live events in 2018. Marketing Dive's introduction to AR trends found that the most successful implementations of AR were those where the brand provides goggles with apps that have been customized for the event, over brands that created apps for event attendees to download onto their own phones.

Takeaways

The upside of working in a field where the rules are constantly in flux is that you have a strong probability of changing the rules in your favor, for a limited window. Reviewing the latest trends in live events and experiential marketing indicates that you can walk away with the following lessons, if you act with deliberate and careful speed:

• You will be better able to establish ROI for experiential marketing when they lay out specific goals up front and then build unique metric dashboards around each event.
• It’s time to start thinking about ROI in terms of intangibles like lift in customer sentiment, excitement carrying over to post-event interactions on social, and brand mentions across media.
• There’s a great deal of value to be explored in expanding your definition ROI to include Return on Innovation. That involves measuring how much real impact creative campaigns and cross-channel concepts had on the lives of customers and event attendees.
• Every event’s impact, both financial and reputational, can be amplified with a data-driven campaign linking social to experiential campaigns throughout their lifecycle.
• Novelty wears off but consumers recognize value. Make sure your campaigns involving AR or other experiential technology fit into the strategic vision of the brand. Use AR to amaze, instruct, and engage in line with the brand’s central message.