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Finding Maximum Return on Your Experiential Marketing Spend

In today’s shifting media landscape, building experiences for your consumers has taken on an increasingly large importance. As traditional marketing outlets continue to decline in reach and reliability, it has been left to experiences, both digital and in person, to close much of the marketing gap, and build brand affinity. This is particularly true in trying to reach the coveted 18–35 year old demographic.


This trend has lead to the rise for the ‘Experience’ that brands must create to engage with their consumers. As a marketer, this is a difficult task. Experiences do not have a 30-second template, or boundary; they are incredibly unique to each brand, task, and marketing objective; and they often stitch together disseparate disciplines, departments, and budgets to build something truly successful. With these challenges, it is a tough task to create an Experience that resonates. This is only part of the battle, once you have designed and executed your experience, the big question becomes: Did It Work?

Did It Work – Finding Return On Investment

In order to define this, first the marketer requires a full understanding of the objectives – What was the core strategy? The intent? Was this done as a straight awareness play? To gather leads? Earn social capital or media exposure to enhance your content marketing clout?

Ideally, this would be mapped prior to the experience design and is often an afterthought. Each of these factors needs to be weighed, and have a Key Performance Indicator placed next to them.

Unfortunately, this is the easy part. The hard part is that now you’ve run a great sampling event / sponsorship / tour / experiential campaign – how do you QUANTIFY the numbers? The cost side is relatively straightforward:  just corral all of your vendors and tools, and add. This probably happened at the budgeting process regardless. The real challenge is getting data with actionable insights.

Getting Actionable Data

Acquiring data is the hard part of the experiential evaluation process. Where to get the data from? Your experience probably ran across a number of online channels, live engagements, and post engagement touch points. Some of this information will be in the hands of various teams, departments and vendors. Your PR team can give you earned media; your agency can give you web; your email service provider or CRM team or tool will give you follow-up communications; and you may have some onsite data. It is important to build a process that collects all of this data, and places it against the original objectives and KPIs. When the two are evaluated, you will have a clear idea of true ROI; something that often is missing from an Experiential Marketing campaign review.

For more information on boosting Experiential ROI, contact us