If you’re an experiential agency or if your organization is involved in creating live experiences the majority of your focus is likely on the “day of” event experience. It’s what you’re great at and that’s fantastic! But have you thought about the holistic consumer journey? It’s time to move beyond the single moment, and start building the journey from beginning to end.
Even if you’re currently trying to take a holistic view, are you tracking the whole customer journey using data and analytics? You need to understand and identify the people that are coming out and interacting with your brand. It’s imperative to know where the first touch happened, what subsequent interaction that person had with your brand and how they advocate for you outside of the experience. Tracking that journey is essential. To illustrate that point we can walk through a client experience:
What really resonated between our client and us was that they were doing so much more than just producing experiences and building some return on objectives (ROO) around their live marketing. They were really stitching the consumer journey together from social media and pre-event festivities, to the event itself and the post experience communication. Our client was able to design the tangible and intangible experience to create a seamless flow of data and analytics. What this gave them was a complete profile of who their consumers are and where they came from.
Prospective and current customers would show up at a brewery, take a tour, and engage with brewery staff. After some time had passed, those same consumers might join them on one of their lifestyle activations or product launches. Consumers might also come to sponsorship activations, like a music festival, where the brewery had a sampling tent to let guest try their flavours and ultimately sell beer. This specific client sold beer but the concept applies to every live experience. Some examples include: automotive test drives, CPG product samplings, financial sponsorship and even more!
It’s about building a complete consumer journey. The goal is to find out who their real brand advocates were, what their consumer profile is and if they were visiting them out in the live space. They were also looking at different ways to engage them across their entire catalogue of experiences. How did they track who was attending their live experiences and determine who kept coming back as brand advocates? By stitching the complete journey.
Let's use the example of a bowtie. In our business, everyone focuses on the middle of the bowtie - the actual experience itself. Here at Limelight Platform, we expand the middle to also focus on the before and after. It’s the post event experience which really stitches together the entire journey and closes the loop.
Our clients use social monitoring software and us, Limelight Platform, to stitch together the consumer journey through the live experience. Using data and analytics, they can track a myriad of insights, which include:
• What are customers coming to?
• Where do they keep coming back to?
• How are they interacting throughout all these different types of live activations?
Most brands have no idea that these people have already participated in three prior experiences throughout the year. By pursuing the consumer journey from beginning to end, opposed to solely focusing on ‘the middle of the bowtie’, you’re able to track and drive true insight around what consumers are interested in, and how they are interacting with your brand and experience. Now, with the help of platforms such as Limelight you can further market to those people, and really leverage and engage them to build the brand awareness, and really understand the journey around the live activation.
Next time, opposed to solely focusing on ‘the middle of the bowtie’, you should stitch together the customer journey in a holistic way, and see how these relationships develop over time. By doing so, you will be able to see who your real brand advocates are, how to engage them before and after the event and how to make them come back to your experiences.