11.30.22
By Lisa Major
At the heart of any effective marketing campaign is an excellent strategic idea that instantly connects with a target audience and motivates and changes behavior that favors your brand. But a CFO will say an idea is only as effective as the future revenue it generates, right?
How do you effectively measure the impact of experiential marketing when the key success metric is less likely to correlate directly to sales? How do ethereal metrics like brand awareness and engagement translate into a tangible ROI calculation? As marketing managers and CMOs continue to invest in experiential marketing as a high-impact campaign tactic, the investment and effort should be managed with the bottom line in mind.
An event staffing plan is a great place to start. Once your metrics and measurement strategy is in place, share it with your staffing partner as soon as possible. Staffing is a crucial component in executing experiential marketing strategies because your staff creates the human-to-human connection between your brand and audience. Their performance can have a major impact on whether or not you meet your target metrics.
By understanding what success looks like upfront, an experienced event staffing company can recommend staffing solutions that make sense for both your campaign goals and your ROI projection.
Event staff, brand ambassadors, and experiential marketing teams are invaluable in collecting first-party data from your target audience. Make sure this is integrated into the overall audience experience and becomes a crucial part of the metrics and measurement plan! First-party data is much more helpful in calculating campaign ROI because the data can be more easily translated to current or future sales with CRM tools.
To successfully collect a consumer’s personal data, though, the ask needs to be seamless within the branded experience. Instead of having your event team directly ask for, then personally input audience data, have the consumers enter their data themselves as a way to “unlock” a part of the experiential event. The conversion rate will be stronger when audiences are pulled into engagement rather than pushed by a brand.
The best way to manage a budget and ROI expectations is to determine what works first and scale it to a larger audience. Not only does it take some of the risks out of the overall investment, but it also allows you to fine-tune the audience experience to be the most impactful and successful at exceeding metric goals.
Start with one or a few launch markets to hone the creative strategy, engagement tactics, and overall audience experience. There may be opportunities to save budget as the campaign expands once teams uncover what works and what doesn’t. The hired teams on the ground will be able to give great insight into how audiences are responding to your efforts.
More brands and marketers are turning to experiential marketing because of its ability to create meaningful and long-lasting connections with an audience. But it only makes sense to continue if there is a positive ROI. Knowing how you will measure success upfront is the first step to maximizing the gains.
ATN Event Staffing is your go-to staffing partner in planning top-tier experiential marketing events. Our expertise makes the hiring process of event teams or brand ambassadors a seamless part of your planning process, earning you positive brand engagements and connections. Our clients look to us for regional and national events, where we’ve provided experiential professionals for over two decades.
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