Experiential Marketing: Choosing Metrics

Before you tackle any experiential marketing campaign, consider how you’ll measure your success. Every marketing campaign requires a method of measurement to determine the ROI or return on investment.

Your ROI will tell you whether the time and resources you put into the campaign were worth the results that came out of it.

Avoid assuming that the results of experiential marketing, subjective and emotional, are impossible to measure.

Instead, take time with these initial considerations to establish accurate metrics to measure your ROI.

How Do You Measure ROI for an Experiential Marketing Campaign?

For you to measure your success, you first have to define what that success looks like. Some aspects to consider are:

• attendance numbers
• genuine attention
• interaction
• online action
• likes and shares
• hashtags

Answer the question: What is it that you hope to achieve through your experiential marketing campaign?

This will lead you in the right direction. It will inform you on what metrics can eventually use to measure your ROI.

You should be able to expressly state your goals, concerning, for example, an uptick in leads generated or sales made. Other examples include an increased awareness of, affinity for, or likelihood to recommend your brand.

Whether your goals are more concrete or more subjective, you must create a quantifiable measurement system by which to measure them.

Now That You’ve Set Goals, What Metrics Should You Use to Measure Them?

The metrics essentially measure the extent and influence of your audience engagement.

Integrate social media into your campaign. This is one of the best ways to measure the social engagement of your audience. With social media analytics, you have a quantifiable measure of success.

Understand your metrics for what they are. You want the content of your marketing to get your audience to engage in a meaningful way.

Not all metrics by social media analytics show meaningful engagement. Remember to take this into account when gauging likes, shares, and comments.

Social media is just one form of reach figures you can use as a metric. “Reach” refers to exposure.

How many people were exposed to your brand as a result of the campaign? Use reach metrics as a quantifiable measure of your campaign’s success.

Samples and promotions show your audience interacting with your brand. You can distribute samples during the campaign to easily measure reach, but this doesn’t guarantee that you had a memorable interaction with your customer.

Combine this with a results-oriented measurement to find out how meaningful the interactions actually were.

Similarly, you can keep track of how many promotions like vouchers or online sales codes were distributed during the campaign.

This measurement, paired with the redemption level of the promotions, can also be used to count meaningful brand interactions.

Remember, the best first steps of a successful experiential marketing campaign are to establish goals and a quantifiable scale of measurement.

After this, it’s just a matter of choosing the right tools to capture your measurements. This will allow you to measure the campaign’s ROI and determine what parts of the campaign you should change and keep for next time.