Experiential: Is It Worth It?

Brand marketers seek immersive, engaging, and shareworthy experiences, but struggle with high costs and uncertain ROI.

There is no doubt that experiential marketing is expensive. A memorable brand experience requires significant investment in creative development, logistics, and staffing. Even if your event is a success, determining return on investment (ROI) can be challenging. What is the value of a positive social media post or brand affinity? There is no question that brand building has long-term benefits, but it can be difficult to trace these benefits back to the initial investment.

To solve this conundrum, we're sharing is ALT TERRAIN's checklist for measuring its effectiveness:

Pre-event exposure: Measure how many people saw and interacted with your event promotion communications, such as social media posts, website pages, and email campaigns. You can track impressions, RSVPs, and social media engagement (comments, shares, follows, sign-ups, etc.) to measure pre-event exposure.

Dwell time: Dwell time is the amount of time people spend at your event. It is a good indicator of how interested, engaged, and satisfied they are with your brand. You can measure dwell time manually or with beacon technology.

Direct sales: Track your sales before, during, and after your event to see if there is a lift. Many brands sell products onsite and offer promo codes to encourage people to buy after the event.

First-party data: Collect people's information at your event, such as email addresses and phone numbers. You can do this with contests and giveaways, photo booths, and app sign-up incentives. This data will help you stay in touch with potential customers and learn more about them.

Engagement: Experiential marketing events are all about engagement. Track engagement by measuring the types of brand activities people participate in (demos, games, sampling, etc.) and by watching for upticks in social media engagement from people at the event and those who see it online.

Community: Measure how your experiential marketing event affects your brand community on social media platforms like Twitter and Twitch.

Perception: Track how your target audience perceives your brand before and after your experiential marketing campaign. You can do this with event exit surveys, focus groups, and social media sentiment analysis.

Loyalty: Measuring the impact of experiential marketing on brand loyalty is challenging, but it is important. One way to do this is to track repeat purchases from people who attended your event. Another way is to measure general customer retention rates over time if you host several events in a city.

Event coverage: Experiential marketing campaigns can generate a lot of earned media, such as news articles, influencer posts, and social media mentions. Track the volume and tone of the coverage to get an idea of how effective your campaign was at generating buzz and interest.

Demand generation: Measure the impact of your experiential marketing campaign on website visits, newsletter sign-ups, appointment requests, and social media interest.

Return on investment: ROI is the most important KPI for many businesses. Calculate ROI by comparing the cost of your campaign to the rise in revenue or value generated over a specific period of time.

Don't forget the emotions: Experiential marketing is all about creating positive experiences for people. While it can be difficult to measure emotions like anticipation, attraction, excitement, joy, sense of belonging, and love, they are important outcomes of experiential marketing campaigns.

Overall, measuring the effectiveness of experiential marketing requires a multi-faceted approach that considers both quantitative and qualitative data. By tracking a variety of metrics, you can evaluate the campaign's impact on brand awareness, perception, engagement, community, social, and sales. Most importantly, you can now prove that experiential is 100% worth the investment.