Measuring Returns on Experiential Marketing

As described in the recent book Experiential Marketing, which is formatted around Blazinstar Experiential’s unique planning system; SET MESSAGE, it is of high importance to build in systems and mechanisms for measurement into your campaign plan, enabling you to gauge effectiveness during the campaigns progress. Therefore, by the time that you come to evaluate the campaign post activation, you will have acquired plenty of qualitative and quantitative data during the gauging effectiveness stage for you to format and analyse. If the experiential marketing campaign is ongoing, then you may want to break it up into chunks and complete the evaluation stage at the end of each chunk.

After the campaign is over, the results from the amplification channels (traditional marketing channels, integrated to amplify the live brand experience) should be straightforward as those channels have common metrics, the results from the live brand experience channel which were collected in real time when you gauged the effectiveness of the activity, should be combined into a report that includes the results of the amplification channels; the two sets of data from the body of information and intelligence that you will then dissect to evaluate the experiential marketing campaign as a whole.

Your systems and mechanisms for measurement should have been built into the live brand experience, and the gauging effectiveness stage should have been completed during the campaigns process, even if this is all handled by an experiential marketing agency and their live brand experience team, you may wish that an external market research agency still completes a formal independent audit. The combined results should form the basis of information and data that you (or your experiential marketing agency) will work with when evaluating the campaign.

‘Return on investment’ originated as an accounting term but is usually regarded as a grey area in marketing, often being used interchangeably with ‘the results generated’ from a campaign. The term ROI can be used as a measure of the profit made, as a direct measurable result of a campaign. For that to be instantly possible in the case of a live brand experience, the experience would need to be either near to a store that sold the product being promoted, or there will need to be a traceable mechanism and incentive in place, such as redeemable sales promotion vouchers or online promotional codes. All of the above clearly points towards short-term thinking. This also implies that the goal of the investment was an instant sales uplift and suggests that it is necessary for sales promotion to be involved.

Another way to look at the return is in the context of a long-term experiential marketing communications agency, where the ultimate objective of the live brand experience channel is to convert participants into loyal customers, then into brand advocates, and finally into brand evangelists. In this case, the return can be measured by how far the live brand experience succeeds in moving the consumer through the advocacy pipeline.
With that said, it is clear in business that good healthy sales and market share are the ultimate goals. There is no reason to think that the goalpost is moving, in fact far from it. The value of a customer, who talks about your brand as if it was a trusted friend, and considers its relationship with your brand to be a two-way street, is priceless. People trust people, and there is nothing that could be more desirable from a business perspective, than your target audience spreading positive word of mouth about your product to their peers. It is proven that personal recommendations are the most likely factor to influence purchase consideration, and the lifetime value of the customer is far greater than the value that any instant sales uplift campaign could generate.

The impact of a positive live brand activation agency experience can be so great that a participant can move through the advocacy stages very quickly, but to make a long lasting impact across a whole target audience, those reached by the word of mouth and amplification channels of the experiential marketing campaign should be factored in to the equation.